Burnt Out ♡ this was so good that I read it in a day! The first half of this book described the feeling of living in Australia during bush fire season perfectly, and the second half was really thought provoking. It also had a really sweet ending, I absolutely loved this book! An easy 5/5 stars!

This book comes out early next year. Thank you to @harpercollinsaustralia and @netgalley for the earc.

[Author 'reviewing' own book]

Burnt Out is about a struggling, story-less author who loses everything in a devastating Blue Mountains bushfire and suddenly finds national fame and commercial success as a result. But how much is she willing to morally compromise to maintain this success? Set in contemporary Sydney and the Blue Mountains, it takes inspiration from the Australian bushfires of 2019-20 that had my local community on edge for months.

I wrote the first lines of Burnt Out while preemptively evacuated from my Blue Mountains home on a 'Catastrophic' fire danger day during the Black Summer. The seed idea for the story had come to me as a darkly comedic shower thought one December morning shortly before that. I was weary after finally giving up on a novel I'd been writing for five years (!!), and exhausted from being on edge for weeks due to the bushfires that were surrounding us in the Mountains. With fires creeping closer, the smell of smoke constantly burning my throat, and my kids stuck inside in the air con all day every day, there was a sense of inevitability about the fires. It felt like it was never going to end (a feeling we'd all soon become familiar with in the pandemic, of course!).

So there in the shower I had this idea: what would it be like if a fire came up and burned EVERYTHING, including all my years of failed drafts for that novel? All that work. What then? I delved deeper into that idea, wrote those first lines on my phone while wandering aimlessly around the shops (our evac boxes and suitcases in the back of the car) and soon, Cali Lyons was born.

It was such a joy to write a character like Cali; a young woman who loses everything, but still finds the words and the spirit to say what needs to be said when it counts. Suddenly, for the first time in ages, life falls into place for her in an awesome way, But things aren’t as they seem. It’s all built on lies, and Cali’s pretty sure that the precarious house of cards she’s built is about to come tumbling down.

I hope you enjoy reading Burnt Out as much as I enjoyed writing it.