Breathing Fire

“Riveting from the first page, Jaime Lowe’s Breathing Fire is an unsentimental and vividly human portrait of a group of women in an inmate firefighting program that every Californian relies on―a program that the state presents as transformative and redemptive even as these women risk their lives for dollars a day and emerge into abandonment. Lowe’s writing is kinetic, her focus is resolutely intimate even as her frame remains far-reaching, and her reporting is essential. This book is a lasting entry in the pantheon of California nonfiction, that literature of desperation and promise and emergency.”

—Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

“Breathing Fire is a powerful examination of the lives of the Malibu 13, whose labor, like that of the hundreds of incarcerated women who live (and sometimes die) fighting wildland fires, keeps the residents of the State of California safe each year. But this book is so much more. It is the story of friendship, and of prisons, jails, and foster homes, and of love and family life and labor in the wake of mass incarceration. Lowe’s vivid and sensitive account walks us through a history of confinement in California through the arrest, imprisonment, release and collective mourning of a generation of women caught in the gears of the American criminal justice system.”

—Reuben Jonathan Miller, author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

“With dogged reporting, and an unforgettable cast of strong women as its memorable characters, Breathing Fire tells a powerful story. The heroes here are women inmates fighting for their lives on burning hillsides, and inside prison yards and bad relationships. They seek redemption with chainsaws, shovels and axes in hand. Jaime Lowe tells their story with respect and compassion, and with a sharp eye for injustice.”

—Héctor Tobar, author of Deep Down Dark

“Jaime Lowe's deeply reported, intimate account of the women on the front lines of climate change and its horrific tolls knocked the wind out of me. Breathing Fire is about risk and loss and injustice and terror, told through keenly inscribed individual stories; it is riveting and heartbreaking.”

—Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger and All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“We see and hear and breathe with the women Jaime Lowe profiles as they fight forest fires while also doing time. Her deep reporting and immersive storytelling animates every page of this intimate and powerful book, which is also a snapshot of unnerving environmental change.”

—Emily Bazelon, author of Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“In recent years, women inmates have joined the army of prison labor that California relies upon to fight its wildfires, whether defending the Sequoias or celebrity homes on the Malibu Coast. It is dangerous, relentless work that ultimately depends upon the arduous personal transformations that create unity and fighting spirit within each fire crew. Against the background of recent megafires, Lowe chronicles the transcendent moments of triumph and tragedy that stir ambitions of a new life, but then recounts the systemic cruelty that undermines every hope of translating their new skills and hard-won self-confidence into civilian careers. Lionesses betrayed.”

—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear