In 2020, when a dry-lightning storm set off wildfires in Northern California, the sky went an eerie red and orange. Author Manjula Martin, like others, noticed the number of photos on social media. “It seemed that everyone who lived beneath the sky without a sky was trying to capture it,” she writes in her memoir. “The captions all used the same term: apocalyptic. Such hyperbole was forgivable today.” Martin moved to the woods in Sonoma County, in part because she suffered pain from botched reproductive procedures but also to be closer to a landscape like that of her childhood in Santa Cruz. In the midst of the pandemic, when the LNU Lightning Complex Fire broke out, Martin and her neighbors had to evacuate. Dominant environmental narratives of California’s terrain are interleaved with a harrowing personal story of medical crisis involving a broken IUD; Indigenous perspectives on fire; observations of the natural world; and literature, as Martin comes to nuanced and surprising understandings about “cycles of damage and renewal” and how we might better move toward caring for, rather than seeking to control, the West.•
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THE LAST FIRE SEASON: A PERSONAL AND PYRONATURAL HISTORY, BY MANJULA MARTIN
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