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Fire Conditions by Thomas C. Malin (WWA Press, 2024)
I love to celebrate the work of small presses. This fall, the Wisconsin Writers Association has released Fire Conditions, a coming-of-age novel by Thomas C. Malin.
One of the things I admire most about this book is its strong sense of place. Set in the nineteen-fifties in the town of Friendship in Adams County, Wisconsin, Fire Conditions is the story of Mike and his younger brother Jimmy, who travel from Chicago to spend the summer with their grandmother while their parents work out some difficulties in their marriage. Along the way, Mike joins a club called the Big Fish People, builds a fort, has his first kiss, and looks out for his little brother. But there are dangerous forces at work, even in Friendship; and soon, Mike must determine what kind of man he is going to be.
Friendship is chock-full of colorful small-town characters. Readers who grew up on The Magic School Bus series might recognize a nod to Miss Frizzle in Grandma Flowers’ colorful dresses printed with daffodils or purple iris. When the sirens wail in the middle of the night, Grandma Flowers scrambles the children from bed to try and beat the sheriff, who is also her boyfriend, to the scene of a fire. Having ceded her entire house to her dogs and her parakeet Pookah, Grandma Flowers houses the boys over the bar she runs. This is in stark contrast to the boys’ other, wealthier grandparents, who have built a fancy compound on a nearby lake.
Grandma introduces the boys to her friend Lena, who lives in a remote place and just might be a Wiccan; and while this troubled me at first, Malin gives us a sensitive treatment of religion elsewhere in the book. He presents the town’s Lutherans and Catholics without caricature, and when the boys attend their first church funeral, Mike wrestles with questions of belief in an age-appropriate way. Similarly, Mike acknowledges the prejudices of some of his elders without sharing them. Malin brings a light touch to Mike’s friendships with Goose, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, and Will, who has lost his mobility to polio. The story beautifully evokes boyhood in the nineteen-fifties: readers will love to imagine themselves out in the woods building forts or going to club meetings without constant parental supervision.
Of course, any book that features a fire-chasing grandmother with her own pistol is bound to end up in adventure and danger, and Fire Conditions does not disappoint. There is plenty of peril and mystery to go around. But near the end, there is also an unexpectedly moving and delicate portrayal of the aftermath of childhood trauma. Fire Conditions is a delightful sojourn “in the town called Friendship, its first name being Adams, where we Big Fish People played and worked and cared deeply about each other.”
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 