Summer Reading

Riley's Fire

by Lee Merrill Byrd

Algonquin, 261 pp., $19.95

When our children come into the world, we marvel at their 10 tiny fingers and toes, wonder what color their eyes will be, and debate whether their noses favor Mommy or Daddy in shape. So what happens, then, when our children set themselves on fire and those adorable noses are gone, scorched into oblivion, leaving scar tissue and heartbreak behind? This is the primary concern of El Paso writer Lee Merrill Byrd's debut novel, which tells the story of a young boy as he recovers from a disfiguring fire that forces him and his parents to rethink the ways they approach the world. On one hand, Riley's Fire is the stereotypical "triumph of the human spirit" story we've all come to recognize as consumers of culture; on the other, it is Byrd's love letter to her sons and the Shriners Burns Institute in Galveston, where her boys recovered from a childhood playhouse fire. Riley's journey from the simmering brink of death to the warm light of home is told in Spartan terms; Byrd wastes no purple prose in telling this story, which is slow to jell as Riley regains his voice after his accident. Byrd's blatantly autobiographical portrait of Riley's grieving, lonely mother is a wondrously drawn character that realizes the enormity of her son's disfigurement before he does and nearly folds under the emotional weight of that reality. One suspects that this novel is Byrd's attempt to reconcile herself with the past and forgive the fire that changed her family.