...an urgent, lucid, courageous account ... behind the book’s matter-of-fact prose, Greta’s parents emerge as involuntary superheroes and recipients of no awards but hard-won wisdom ... the book is a highly readable sequence of shortish 'scenes' written in the direct language Greta uses in her speeches. The life-vest of humour inflates more often than you’d expect, and the text is studded with subversive, persuasive maxims ... I wrote down several pages of quotations for this review until it got ridiculous: I was copying out half the book ... Piety – these days rebranded as virtue signalling – is notable in the book by its absence ... everyone with an interest in the future of the planet should read this book. It is a clear-headed diagnosis. It is a glimpse of a saner world. It is fertile with hope.

...an unflinching look at both [Greta's] family cosmos and the civilisation that it is embedded within ... Melana has written what is a polemical, a manifesto, smuggled in under the cloak of a celebrity memoir. It is cunning and clever. We are ushered along with tidbits of what we want, we are given full-frontal views through their living-room window. But there is always a level of irony to this. We look between the curtains clutching peanuts and they, mid act, meet us with a sardonic stare. It is a confrontation: we see you looking, while you carry on as normal, and retweet our daughters’ posts ... We are left reminded, the future is ours to choose. It’s time for us to take our place on the stage, then. It’s time for us to come out from behind the curtains, dust the peanut skin off our hands.

It's...like a new form of nonfiction, intimate and approachable as a photo album: a family memoir ... A language of music and stagecraft pervades the whole book, which unfolds in a series of 'Scenes'—pithy episodes from the life of the family, dense with metaphors of song ... The account of Malena and Svante’s struggle to find help and to feed [Greta], one tiny mouthful of rice or avocado at a time, is acutely painful to read ... Malena writes with crisp authority ... this is also a remarkable story of togetherness: a modern family shifting and pivoting to keep each person afloat ... Grown-ups should read this book.

It makes for a fascinating, if slightly chaotic read, jumping between chapters on Malena’s career as an opera singer, Greta and Beata’s problems, and the climatic havoc humanity is wreaking on the planet. At times, it feels like there is more than one book here. I was not especially interested in Greta’s mother’s mission to 'take high culture down a notch'; I wanted to understand what drives the teenager who finally got the world to talk about climate change ... The book ends before Greta becomes a global icon — and there are fair questions about how any teenager could handle that, child stars being the archetypal nervous-breakdowns-in-waiting. Yet it strikes me that this 17-year-old may be the true adult among us and the rest of us, always taking more, are the ones who are really behaving like spoilt children.

While Greta’s international fame will undoubtedly secure a wide audience for the book, it is hard to see what it offers its readers. Those avid for personal gossip about the Thunberg/Ernman family will find little to satisfy their curiosity ... Critics sceptical that Greta’s initiative was entirely her own may find their doubt fuelled by Malena’s eloquent accounts of her own climate activism, while those convinced by climate change science may be dismayed by the book’s eccentricity. Malena’s argument that feminism, mental health and climate activism are interconnected is persuasive but her insistent iterations are strikingly less potent than Greta’s restrained passion. And although Greta and Beata presumably consented to the dramatic descriptions of their mental health problems, these nevertheless feel extremely intrusive ... the prose is idiosyncratic, single-sentence paragraphs abound — and when not confounding the reader with dire statistics, Malena is the mistress of the untelling detail ... Only when Malena is discussing herself does the narrative switch from monochrome to glorious technicolour ... a straightforward memoir might have been a wiser choice of project than this uneasy account of painful family dynamics, awkwardly (and, it is hard not to feel, somewhat expediently) hitched to the environmental issues of which Greta has become a global symbol.

...a more vulnerable and intimate portrait emerges in the telling of Thunberg’s origin story ... Thunberg’s parents have referred to this bleak period before, but their memoir offers searing details of what it felt like to watch her harrowing descent ... Greta Thunberg’s ascent has been plagued by debunked conspiracy theories, hoaxes and seething accusations aimed at her parents, alleging that the teenager is merely a puppet used to further their agenda — that she is indoctrinated, manipulated, brainwashed ... Our House Is On Fire is a resounding rejection of those false claims.

...this blazingly candid family memoir reveals the grueling and bewildering struggles that propelled Greta onto the world stage ... Narrated primarily by her mother, opera singer Malena Ernman, with passages from Greta, her sister, and their father, and written in brief, hard-hitting 'scenes,' this is an unnerving and profoundly enlightening chronicle of the symbiosis between human and planetary health as manifest within one remarkable family whose painful awakening to our 'acute sustainability crisis' should embolden us all.