A house fire takes about fifteen minutes to gut a kitchen. A marriage can take fifteen years to come apart, longer if you count the careful repairs. In her sophomore novel, The Burning Side, Sarah Damoff puts both timelines on the same page and asks what survives when everything you built with someone else turns to ash.<\/p>\n
The Burning Side by Sarah Damoff opens on the night April and Leo\u2019s house in Argyle, Texas catches flame. April escapes clutching her baby in one arm and a book in the other. Leo emerges with their daughter slung over his shoulder. Behind them, the kitchen roars. In front of them, the rest of their lives.<\/p>\n
What the firefighters don\u2019t know is that hours before the smoke alarm went off, Leo told April he wants a divorce.<\/p>\n
With nowhere else to go in the middle of the night, they retreat to April\u2019s childhood home on Lexington Avenue in Dallas. Her mother, Deb, makes quiche. Her father, Billy, sets the table. And her sister Josie cracks jokes. Underneath the casseroles and Topo Chicos, the Russo family is also nursing a private emergency: Billy has just been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Damoff lets these two crises sit beside each other without forcing them to rhyme.<\/p>\n
The novel rotates between several point-of-view characters, and Damoff handles the choreography with confidence:<\/p>\n
April<\/strong>, a dyslexic former literacy tutor who wears motherhood like a second skin she isn\u2019t sure fits Each voice has its own pulse. April is observant and self-flagellating. Leo is sensory and braced. Deb is dry, wry, and load-bearing. The chapters move between the \u201cDay After the Fire\u201d timeline in 2022 and a long flashback running from 2011 onward, the years that built the marriage now in question. Damoff writes in present tense throughout, which gives even the oldest chapters the immediacy of something happening to you now.<\/p>\n This is where The Burning Side by Sarah Damoff earns its keep. Family novels that hop between viewpoints often feel like coverage of an event. Damoff\u2019s feel like overhearing.<\/p>\n There is a particular kind of attention in this book that is hard to fake. The author writes the small, weird, specific gestures of a long relationship: the husband who knows exactly how much sugar his wife takes on her grapefruit, the mother who can tell which kid is on the stairs by the creak, the sister who shorthand-teases the way only siblings can. The novel keeps insisting that love is mostly furniture and noise, not declarations.<\/p>\n Sibling banter that sounds like siblings.<\/strong> Josie, Cameron, and April have the specific shorthand of people who grew up sharing one bathroom. The way you tease your sister at twenty-eight is a sediment of how you teased her at eight, and Damoff knows it. A four-star novel earns its critiques alongside its bouquets. This book is the work of a writer who trusts beauty. Sometimes she trusts it a touch too much.<\/p>\n The pace drifts.<\/strong> The middle stretch lingers on quiet domesticity for chapter after chapter. Readers who came for the friction of a marriage on the brink may find the slow stitching of memory testing their patience. None of this collapses the book. It does explain why some readers will love it without quite worshipping it.<\/p>\n Damoff is unafraid of the sentence. Her prose carries hints of Mary Oliver (who opens the novel as the epigraph) and Ada Lim\u00f3n, who lurks inside the plot itself. The book is studded with lines you might want to copy onto a sticky note. A house \u201cabandoned for years, not inhabited only yesterday.\u201d A marriage that is \u201ca carousel for those who can stomach the cycles of it.\u201d A grandmother who teaches herself Spanish in her sixties because her son-in-law is half-Mexican.<\/p>\n If you loved Damoff\u2019s debut novel, The Bright Years, you will recognize the same generous attention to domestic interiors and the same willingness to sit inside grief without flinching. The Burning Side feels like a confident step forward in scope and structure, even if its emotional register is similar.<\/p>\n Lean toward literary fiction that prizes interiority over plot fireworks If you want a clean plot engine or a thriller\u2019s pulse, this is not your book. The Burning Side by Sarah Damoff is moodier than that, and proud of it.<\/p>\n Tom Lake<\/a> by Ann Patchett.<\/strong> Same affection for parents, memory, and the past returning to a present-day home. Sarah Damoff has written a quietly burning novel about what stays when the house comes down. The Burning Side by Sarah Damoff does not pretend forgiveness is easy, and it does not pretend it is impossible either. It pays attention. It listens. And it earns its quiet.<\/p>\n A few of its images sit a little too plainly on the page, and its middle could be tightened by fifty pages without losing anything important. But there is a real writer at work here, and the kind of patience for ordinary life that most novels are too busy to offer.<\/p>\n Light a candle, ignore your phone, and let this one breathe at its own pace.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A house fire takes about fifteen minutes to gut a kitchen. A marriage can take fifteen years to come apart, longer if you count the careful repairs. In her sophomore novel, The Burning Side, Sarah Damoff puts both timelines on the same page and asks what survives when everything you built with someone else turns […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6398"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nLeo<\/strong>, a high school history teacher raised inside a fractured Tejano family in West Texas
\nDeb<\/strong>, April\u2019s mother, who has been holding the people in her life together since she was seventeen
\nRico and Ana<\/strong>, Leo\u2019s biological parents, in flashbacks that crack open his origin story<\/p>\nWhat Damoff Does Better Than Most<\/h3>\n
A Short List of What the Book Gets Right<\/h4>\n
\nThe texture of postpartum darkness.<\/strong> April\u2019s struggle after her second baby is shown rather than diagnosed, and the prose does the heavy lifting without ever reaching for a clinical phrase as a shield.
\nClass without caricature.<\/strong> Leo grew up watching his parents stretch a single box of macaroni. April grew up watching her mother host the neighborhood. The book lets that gap sit between them without scoring easy points.
\nAlzheimer\u2019s as time travel.<\/strong> Damoff calls the disease \u201ca hundred tiny deaths,\u201d and her depiction of Billy\u2019s gentle confusion is among the most moving threads in the novel.<\/p>\nWhere the Book Stumbles<\/h3>\n
A Few Honest Reservations<\/h4>\n
\nSymbolism that announces itself.<\/strong> The fire, the burning side of the house next to the untouched side, the navy versus black paint, the metaphor that closes the book. Damoff is a confident image-maker, but a few of her metaphors get underlined twice when once would have done.
\nApril can read as a touch passive.<\/strong> Her interior life is rich, yet several of her hardest decisions happen offscreen in summary, which blunts their weight.
\nThe Rico and Ana chapters, while gorgeous, occasionally feel imported.<\/strong> They give Leo his roots, but they also pull the reader away from the central marriage just as it starts to crackle.<\/p>\nA Writing Style That Borrows From Poetry<\/h3>\n
Echoes of Her Debut, The Bright Years<\/h4>\n
Who Will Love The Burning Side by Sarah Damoff<\/h3>\n
Bring This Book Home If You\u2026<\/h4>\n
\nCried your way through Ann Patchett\u2019s Tom Lake or Tayari Jones\u2019 An American Marriage
\nWant a family saga that respects parents as full characters, not just backstory
\nAppreciate fiction about long marriages, postpartum struggle<\/a>, dementia, or quiet faith
\nDon\u2019t mind a slow burn that smolders rather than detonates<\/p>\nOne Caveat for the Wrong Reader<\/h5>\n
Books to Read Alongside The Burning Side by Sarah Damoff<\/h3>\n
\nAn American Marriage by Tayari Jones.<\/strong> A marriage tested by forces from outside it, told in shifting voices.
\nThe Most Fun We Ever Had<\/a> by Claire Lombardo.<\/strong> A sprawling family across decades, with siblings who know each other too well.
\nCrossroads by Jonathan Franzen.<\/strong> A family saga with faith threaded through it.
\nStill Life by Sarah Winman.<\/strong> Quiet, patient, sentence-level beauty.
\nHello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano.<\/strong> Sisters, love, and the long arc of choice.
\nFates and Furies by Lauren Groff.<\/strong> Two perspectives on the same marriage, taken apart.<\/p>\nA Final Word<\/h3>\n
The Shortest Possible Take<\/h6>\n