4 August 2002 OUT OF THE FIRE by Deborah Froese, Sumach Press, March 2002

It was the week after the end of fourth grade. Mom had gotten everything together so that when Dad got home from work we immediately piled into our black Rambler station wagon and headed off for Crab Meadow Beach on Long Island Sound. Mom watched over us as we charged into the water--particularly seven-year-old novice swimmer Jimmy--while Dad filled the hibachi with charcoal briquettes and lit it. After dinner we took one last swim as the sun dipped below the horizon. Dad buried the remains of the glowing charcoal in the sand. After drying off, I started down to the water's edge to rinse the sand off of my feet before putting on my sneakers.

I didn't make it there. Pain ripped through me like a lightning bolt. A two inch square blister--colored white and brown--rose on the sole of my foot. I had stepped upon an errant briquette that hadn't been buried deep enough. That pain was something I'd never known the equal of. I ended up barefoot for a week, reading, my foot up on a hassock.

You know those firewalks--where people step barefoot on hot coals? They were really big out here in the '80s. In a million years you couldn't convince me that I could do that! And based on my memory of that relatively minor burn sustained as a kid, my mind cannot begin to comprehend the pain that serious burn victims endure. People die from that kind of trauma.

Dayle, the main character of OUT OF THE FIRE by Debroah Froese, is a burn victim who lives but has to fight to survive the trauma that nearly killed her:

"Time for her basin bath. That's what Cora had told Mom. It made it sound so simple. Close to pleasant, even. But the basin bath brought sharp, steely tools that scraped dead flesh from my body. Morphine distorted the torture but I still knew it for what it was. Debriding. Humiliating and painful, all in the name of therapy.

"And while my flesh was being raked, other gowned people bent and twisted my limbs. They told me the treatment was supposed to keep me limber and prevent the scars of healing from binding me into a tight cocoon. But at that moment I wanted to curl up into a tight cocoon and die, or at least sink so low beneath the surface of the earth that no one would find me."

Surviving a life-threatening burn, especially if your face is involved, means having to eventually deal with the way people look at you. So many times in young adult books--as with real life--young people deal with issues of body image and appearance. My eleven-year-old, Rosemary, tells me quite earnestly that virtually all children her age are extremely concerned with the way they look and the way they dress. (She backed down from her original position that 100 percent of the children her age care, allowing for a few "far-fetched" examples I concocted). But with whom you hang, what you wear, and what you look like are the basis for so many adolescents deciding who you are. And what Dayle faces in terms of appearance is in another league compared to most kids.

In fact, Dayle is a girl who has stepped forth from a cocoon not so long before the horriffic accident. A quiet student, she had gotten up the guts to participate in the school play, and had thereby caught the eye of an extremely popular boy. Dayle even has images of someday modeling. Or had. Unfortunately, as was the case in Cynthia Voight's classic IZZY WILLY NILLY, Dayle's boyfriend Kevin is part of a drinking crowd. Alcohol plays a central role in Dayle's accident, as it did in Izzy's.

OUT OF THE FIRE is a story that might make kids who are fussing about being a little too heavy or pimply or not having exactly the "right" wardrobe think twice about the "problems" they're facing. Even the character in IZZY WILLY-NILLY--a girl who has lost a leg in an accident--would have to pause to consider how bad things are for Dayle.

Hopefully, as with IZZY, teen readers will also consider the alcohol issue. (I'm always telling my children and students how I was one of the lucky fifty percent--that there was a fifty-fifty chance that I could have killed myself or someone else as a result of those many "celebrations" of my younger years).

In OUT OF THE FIRE, Dayle gets a real perspective on the value of family and true friends...and that there's more to life than just the way you look.

"And as Stu pointed out, scars were a mark of experience."

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com