Powerful ... Grounded...surprising ... She braids together strands of various histories — a personal one, along with the larger story of humans and fire — all set against the background of the summer and fall of 2020, when both the pandemic and wildfires were raging ... The range of this book coaxes us to confront our own failures of imagination.
As she recounts months spent dodging and being followed by wildfires, months when the siren on her local firehouse blared almost daily and when smoke overwhelmed her senses, Martin reflects on what it means to make one's home in a place that is destined to burn, and to live 'inside a damaged body on a damaged planet.' Indeed, The Last Fire Season is just as much about learning to live with chronic pain as with fire ... This perspective melds with Martin's nuanced way of seeing fire as both something to fear and as a necessary element in the evolution of the Earth's ecosystems ... The Last Fire Season eschews a redemptive arc in favor of witnessing and sitting with the discomfort of reality, with understanding that, as Martin puts it, 'what happened to the land would happen to me.'
Beautifully written ... Martin makes a strong case that capitalism’s disregard for Indigenous ways of caring for nature has, along with human-caused climate change, worsened the spread and impact of wildfire ... A memoirist’s job is to immerse a reader in a specific time and place. Martin has done that. Unfortunately, it’s boring there ... Nonetheless, Martin’s prose is simultaneously nimble and sturdy, even when she’s making specious arguments.
Martin confronts more complex challenges in the form of relentless, flame-ferrying heat and chronic pain in her new memoir ... She’s at her most compelling, though, looking inward to examine lived experience and the often problematic or insufficient narrative frameworks in which those experiences are couched ... The book rejects tidy generic bounds.
Martin’s text incorporates the voices of Ursula K. Le Guin, Barry Lopez, Ana Mendieta, Masanobu Fukuoka, Donna Haraway, and others. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Tom Waits make appearances, as well. We learn about the spiritual communes of 1970s California, the environmental history of Santa Cruz, wine harvests, and pruning as a form of jazz improv. The prose is beautiful, and digressions on fire poppies, smoke, Rosh Hashanah, devil winds, and incendiary dresses are pure pleasure in the midst of this grave inquest ... The Last Fire Season wants us to see also—to recognize that our seasons in California are not only extreme but are becoming unrecognizable, and that we need new strategies 'to inhabit the new shape of these cycles of damage and renewal.'
Martin’s search for answers takes her far from the events of the specific fire that precipitated them and demands a degree of patience from readers, but her emotional response is palpable and will resonate with many.
Powerful ... Martin draws a layered portrait of her beloved northern California landscapes ... Martin also pays tribute to the mesmerizing, sometimes cleansing, undeniably powerful nature of fire itself: it may be complicated and sometimes dangerous, but it is worthy of respect and care—like the land and the creatures it affects.
Martin offers her mesmerizing, beautifully written account of living through and trying to come to terms with the harrowing impacts of the climate crisis ... Martin’s writing is so immersive that readers will feel the stress ... Martin’s knowledge of nature and the land illuminate every page.
