Sixteen-year-old Iris is obsessed with fire. And art. "I find it near impossible to look anywhere else when there's a fire burning.... I think about the dancing, shifting, elusive character of a fire, of the colors it paints, unlike any other colors I will ever find, in a whole lifetime of looking." After being caught lighting one too many fires at home and in school, and with her family's household debt mounting, Iris is dragged from Los Angeles to the English countryside by her mother, Hannah, who is a self-centered money-grubber, and her stepfather, Lowell, "aging pinup boy, one-time TV star, and current no-hoper." Hannah and Lowell are in pursuit of an inheritance from Iris's "sick old stranger of a father," who happens to be a millionaire art collector.
Forced to spend her father's last dying days with him, Iris discovers something that staggers her: that she could be "loved so much and by someone my mother only taught me to hate." Disgusted by her mother's grasping materialism--"It's nuts when you think about it, how easily we lose our minds over stuff, how quickly money eats up the world, just like fire"--Iris ponders a way to dodge her mother's unsavory scheme and maybe even get some satisfying revenge while she's at it. British author Jenny Valentine's (Me, the Missing, and the Dead) beautifully written YA novel Fire Color One was a Carnegie Medal finalist. Iris is a grumpy, complex and likable protagonist, with depth and a dark humor, and her hopeful story of redemption will leave readers cheering her on. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor