Boy On Fire: A Novel by Carson Gilmore

Ethan McRae, a volatile and gifted "outcast" is failing his classes at North Valley High. His abilities and talents conflict with the impersonal, administrative structure, and through his difficulties we glimpse the failure of education in general. Ethan becomes obsessed with the sexy sister of Jesse Quinn, a flamboyant and outspoken critic of the system. Finding in Ethan a kindred "spirit in danger of suffocation," Jesse enlightens Ethan to the truth of the public school's rapidly increasing disintegration through corporate and government greed. As the duo of Ethan and Jesse take a stand to salvage what little quality remains in the system-and their private lives, vicious rumors, sexual pressures, sexual confusions, alcohol and drug abuse compounds with the pair's doubts and shortcomings, threatening to send them spiraling further into failure, isolation, and hopelessness. Boy on Fire, authored by an individualist akin to his protagonist, starkly documents the destructive effect of the No Child Left Behind program on talented and creative students who might otherwise explore new, positive values in the American way of life. Boy on Fire propels themes as seen in "La Dolce Vita" into the present; and lends itself to being the "Catcher in the Rye" of the 21st Century.