I wanted to love this book but it just didn't hold my attention. I was expecting more of an investigative journalistic approach but this is a memoir about chronic pain and fire.

I really struggled to engage with the text despite trying numerous times. I didn’t enjoy the work, and while I want to give it a good review, I very honestly cannot. It was hard to read and I struggled with the Authorsvoice.

In this researched memoir, Manjula Martin recounts her experiences with wildfire in 2020 as a resident of coastal Sonoma County, California. If you live in Northern California or have friends or family there, you’ll remember seeing pictures of the orange sky that year (per Martin, no picture captured the full eeriness of that experience). In harrowing, painstaking detail, Martin recounts her and her partner’s decision to evacuate. In spite of Covid, they then go to see her family in Santa Cruz, where they also have to evacuate due to fire. They also go camping in Yosemite to try to avoid both fire and Covid, but it all feels futile. “Evacuation was a constant state of motion,” she writes, “an evolving equation of risk, comfort, and resources.”

Martin supplements her personal experience with research about fire ecology and history, encompassing conversations with a range of experts. One of the most prominent threads in the book is the extent to which settler colonialism has shaped the current state of fire in the American West. Indigenous stewardship includes controlled burns, and settler fire suppression is what enables today’s mega-blazes. Martin reflects critically on her own whiteness and settler positionality, musing on how this has allowed her to be a certain kind of Californian, one who feels ownership over land that isn’t hers and who hopes, against all odds, to be an exception to climate change.

The book was very slow, but this did feel like it was on purpose—some of the passages about fire were meant to be excruciating, and were well-written. Martin’s powers of description are commendable, as is her willingness to put herself “in the hot seat.” She also braids in some reflections that have less to do with fire—on her hippie origins, on a painful health experience of hers—which feel integrated into the larger fabric of the book. It’s a touch long, but full of important insight about the changing state of California.

An original addition to my fire library. Most of the growing pile of books on the subject are either non-fiction accounts of a particular disaster or popular science works explaining how we got to the age of mega-fire. This intimate, poetic essay shows us from a first-person perspective what it means to live through the Pyrocene. Wildfire is always in the background - but life is more complicated and the author shares many other, often difficult experiences, memories and dreams.

Well written and thought provoking.

Thanks to the publisher, Pantheons Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

The Last Season is a captivating love story to the beauty of California. The book takes place during the second half of the year 2020 when the author is in the midst of the COVID pandemic, severe forest fires and the political unrest of the time. I learned a lot about the history of fires, how indigenous people had developed approaches to control fire and so much more. I really enjoyed reading this book and getting to know the author through her personal experiences and relationships. The book is arranged in chronological order with several interludes of recollection which were sometimes a little difficult to follow.

I recommend this book. It left me with a lot of think about regarding class, climate change and the relationship between humans and nature.

Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.