Book Review & Giveaway: After the Fire by Robin Gaby Fisher

2008 at 2pm     Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Recently published on August 25, 2008.

After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival is the story of Shawn Simons and Alvaro Lllanos, best friends and roommates who were living in Boland Hall—Seton Hall University’s freshman dorm–on January 19, 2000, when a horrible fire tore through the building, killing three students and injuring 58 others, including Shawn and Alvaro. The boys, who had just begun their second semester of college, were rushed to the burn unit at nearby Saint Barnabas Hospital, where Dr. Hani Mansour and his widely acclaimed team of burn treatment specialists set to work on the worst burns they had ever seen. After the Fire chronicles Shawn and Alvaro’s journey as they work to heal from their burns and recover from the very personal traumas and tragedies that only they can really understand.

Author Robin Gaby Fisher begins by telling the story of what happened that cold January night. She follows Shawn and Alvaro through their treatments in the burn unit and chronicles their families’ struggles to cope with the difficulty and uncertainty of treatment and prognoses that are truly day-by-day and minute-by-minute. As Shawn recovers much more quickly than anticipated and has the strong support of his almost unshakable mother, Alvaro spends months in a medically induced coma, fighting for his life, and has more than one close call with death as his parents struggle not to break under the pressure.

Fisher’s descriptions of the boys’ families and their emotional journeys are touching and honest; we feel with them and hope with them and share their frustrations. Her grasp of the difficulty faced by Alvaro’s longtime girlfriend, Angie, who must come to grips with what has happened to the man she once thought she would marry and find a way to balance her own needs with her devotion and obligation to Alvaro is solid and heartbreaking. Often difficult to read, Fisher’s descriptions of the treatments the boys received in the tank room are painfully vivid and enable readers to understand exactly how serious their burns were:

The tank room was the heart of burn treatment. Antiseptic, windowless, and brightly lit with fluorescent lights, it looked like other hospital treatment rooms—except that it wasn’t. It was foul smelling and muggy. Between the heat and the sickening odors of burned flesh and open wounds, medical students were known to fain fairly frequently.

The tank room was what burns patients tended to remember most about their hospital stay—even years later. It was the place where they were taken every day to have their open wounds scrubbed with gauze that felt more like sandpaper or Brillo. Called debridement, the scouring was a fundamental step in burn treatment. Proteins leaked from the wounds and formed a film that looked like the cooked white of an egg. The film, which provided a haven for deadly infections, dried into a hard, waxy scab. When it was scrubbed away early in the treatment process, permanent scarring was minimized and the risk of infections was limited.

Interspersed between chapters about Shawn and Alvaro and their families are profiles of the doctors and nurses who worked to treat the boys’ burns and to help them prepare for the emotional and social recoveries that were to follow the physical ones. Fisher does an excellent job portraying the kindness, compassion, skill, and devotion of these people who went far beyond their job descriptions and became like friends and family to the boys.

In an era when nursing had become about handing out pills and hooking up IVs, Mansour’s nurses clung to the ideal of making a difference. They did the dirty work, and people considered them heroic. They were not unlike soldiers who volunteered for combat: driven by the need to feel worthy and to be part of something.

So they stayed for one another. They stayed because for every tragedy, there was a success story. They stayed because no one else would.

After the Fire is compelling and very readable. When Fisher’s publicist contacted me to offer an ARC, I was initially hesitant because this isn’t really the kind of book I usually read. The blurb on the back of my ARC says

Every so often a book comes along that makes us cry and makes us strong, that makes us want to hug our children and call our old friends. This is one of those rare books.

I saw that and thought “no way.” I generally don’t read books that sound like they would make good Lifetime movies or Oprah episodes, but I am so very glad that I read After the Fire. The story of Shawn and Alvaro’s friendship is powerfully touching, and it nearly brought me to tears at several points. Fisher’s portrait of the boys’ families and their respective struggles is at turns heart wrenching and uplifting. Her tracking of the police department’s extensive and frustrating investigation is just detailed enough, and her depiction of the two boys found guilty of setting the fire (after a nearly seven-year-long investigation) is both maddening and restrained.

Throughout the book, I was thankful that it was written by a writer rather than by a survivor who decided to write. So often, stories like this one—stories that deserve to be told—are written by individuals who experienced the events so closely that they often cannot get enough distance from the story to write it very well, or they have co-writers and editors who do not exert enough influence to make the book readable and to give it substance beyond the initial play on the reader’s emotions. I would have liked to hear from Shawn and Alvaro in their own voices, perhaps as a foreword or afterword to the book, but all in all, it was a worthwhile and satisfying read. I’d recommend After the Fire to just about anyone, though the vivid descriptions of the boys’ burns and their subsequent treatments may be too graphic for some readers. This great little book gets a solid 4 out of 5.

Ms. Fisher was kind enough to provide me with an extra ARC, so if you’d like to win a free ARC of After the Fire, leave a comment below. Post about the giveaway on your blog (and leave a link here, of course) to double your entry.  Contest closes Tuesday, September 9th at 11:59 EDT.

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