This book is compulsively readable. It's about Orange's exploration of her relationship between her and her mother. It's short but it packs a punch. I reccommend this for fans of Cusk and Levy.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This is a fascinating story about the author and the two major women of her life, her mother and her grandmother on her mother’s side. Her grandmother got married, raised a family and felt generally unfulfilled. Her mother was doing the same thing, when she decides to go back to school and get an MBA and then takes a job that’s in a different city, leaving her husband and two children behind to see on weekends. The author, who is a teacher and essayist, examines how these two women shaped her life and what feminism means to her and them, while also using examples of mother/daughter relationship in the recent past. Such an honest and open book that never loses its clear eye for the hard truths of family.

Pure Flame takes Michelle Orange's work as a feminist essayist and applies it to her personal story and those of her mother and grandmother. Through this lens, Orange looks at her grandmother's life and her mothers and examines how they were trapped by the cultural role of women and how they, each in her own way, broke from these norms and the effects upon their lives and those of their family.