Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A hotshot firefighter recounts seasons in the burning wilderness. In 2018, having ended a relationship and looking for a new life, Ramsey wound up in a Northern California hamlet called Happy Camp (“Yes, that’s a place”). There, in the formidable tangle of rivers, canyons, and mountains along the Klamath, she found the town in a “biblical crisis” of wildfire, and she volunteered to fight it. Not long after, she was offered a paying position with the U.S. Forest Service, training as a wildland firefighter after passing some tough tests; as her fellow firefighters, all men, learned, she was not just a woman but also much older than they—old enough, she reckons, that if she were an athlete she would have aged out. “Just me and nineteen men who were probably faster, stronger, and more knowledgeable than I was,” she writes. “No big deal.” Undaunted, she met the challenges of firefighting, which include having to pack heavy equipment into remote places, many reachable only on foot, to say nothing of working under cruel conditions: “There was no hiding from the sun, a punishing tyrant that baked our skin….The rocks were secondary suns radiating heat upward, so we were seared evenly, top and bottom, unhappy steaks.” Ramsey is as agile a writer as she was a firefighter, with a welcome sense of humor, as when she writes of a beetle species that can sense wildfires from 100 miles away and swarm there to deposit their eggs in the smoldering wood, safe from predators: “How metal is that?” Eventually, during the Covid-19 pandemic and a year of “millions of acres of the planet I love burning before my eyes,” Ramsey realized that her body was beginning to falter under the strains of the work and, with regret, retired from a job she had come to love. A welcome addition to the burgeoning literature of fire. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Ramsey is a woman seeking herself in all the wrong places. When her memoir begins, she is a rookie on a wildfire-fighting crew in far Northern California. She has, for disparate reasons, chosen to join the roughest and most demanding of crews to begin her career. She was not born to this, though. With bachelor's and master's degrees in humanities and writing, she might be expected to pursue a creative or academic path, but her alcoholic father and unsettled life have left her uncertain of her own value and direction. She is determined to reckon with her self-destructive past and to be part of this male-dominated crew or die trying. Her significant other, also a firefighter but on another crew on a different schedule, turns out to have a much different view of who she is. This is not a glamorous existence: underpaid and underfed, these crews work in dangerous conditions for the love of the work and the land. Readable and compelling, Ramsey's memoir will appeal to fans of Cheryl Strayed.

Publishers Weekly
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In this vivid debut memoir, Ramsey recounts fighting California wildfires for the U.S. Forest Service in 2020 and 2021. When Ramsey was 35, her estranged, unhoused father called her to ask for money, spurring her to “silence grief” about his circumstances with extreme physical exertion, including regular, 14-mile solo hikes in the woods. The next year, following a breakup, Ramsey drew on her newly intense relationship with nature, moved from Texas to California, and took a job with the Forest Service as a wilderness ranger. While living in government barracks with female firefighters, she became “smitten with a new vision of what a woman could be. In a word: strong.” That inspired her to seek a spot with the Rowdy River Hotshots fire crew, an elite group that tackled “the most difficult and remote parts of wildfires.” Ramsey became the only woman on the 20-person team, battling sexism and her own insecurities to help contain a series of blazes, including the massive McCash fire, which spanned from Northern California’s Six Rivers National Forest to “the poison oak–riddled canyons of the Klamath.” Arresting prose, plenty of action, and a strong emotional undercurrent make this sing. Agents: Sam Stoloff and Sulamita Garbuz, Frances Goldin Literary. (June)Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated which years the author fought wildfires and her age when her father called her to ask for money.