cover image Festival in Fire Season

Festival in Fire Season

Ellyn Bache. August House Publishers, $19.95 (239pp) ISBN 978-0-87483-189-4

In the North Carolina coastal town of Festival, over an eight-month period in 1988, Bache ( Safe Passage ) sets the compelling stories of three citizens whose lives encompass racial and class conflicts, marriages of compromise and teenage angst. Cassie Ashby, forlorn and rebellious stepdaughter of the manipulative county commissioner, begins her freshman year of high school by defending her black bus driver falsely accused by a white boy of making sexual advances. Jordan Edge, the vice-principal of the high school, finds fulfillment only in fighting fires. Alona Wand searches for love and fulfillment while creating jewelry and fighting with her staid husband. At the town's annual springtime azalea festival, these smoldering, intertwining narratives will climax in a forest fire that threatens the town. Mostly fast-paced, the novel occasionally falters in Bache's device of disclosing the same events from three points of view. (Mar.)