Burn Fortune | Brandi Homan

16-year-old June is a corn-detasseling flag twirler who lives in a small conservative town in the early 90s Midwest. Her family is dysfunctional but her boyfriend—known only as “My Boyfriend”—has a family who is abusive. Looking for alternatives to the lives of the women who surround her, June becomes obsessed with the actress Jean Seberg (best known for Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless) as well as Joan of Arc. After a trauma, June withdraws and begins to live through Seberg’s films. Offered these lives as alternatives to her own, June is left to wonder: Can anyone truly transcend their circumstances, or does having a dream mean death?

“A scorching anthem of what it means to be a young girl in a small town—the dreams that save us and the realities that pull us under. Alive with longing and the desire to break free.”

—MONA AWAD, AUTHOR OF BUNNY AND ROUGE

“I’m in awe of how Brandi Homan’s Burn Fortune embodies the Midwest’s unfurled earth and stretched skies. There’s a recurring image of detasseling corn, which is what the book does: everything connected by silky strands unraveling until we get to the core, a new image of grit and possibility. And Homan gracefully gives us the space to participate in the making of that new image. Thank you for the grit, the hope.”

—STEVEN DUNN, AUTHOR OF POTTED MEAT AND WATER & POWER

“It’s the 1990s, and June is making her way through high school in Marshalltown, Iowa. Life moves at a laconic pace, spiked with the adrenaline of teenage discovery. But in Brandi Homan’s Burn Fortune, what June discovers about the interminable territory between childhood and adulthood will immolate her. It’s a haunting narrative about a girl’s passage through the invisible gauntlet of sexual violence.”

—Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers, Foreword Reviews

“What Homan gives readers is a rather clear monologue of an early nineties midwestern teen girl in a forgettable town trying to find room to breathe and be something more. It is a very common desire, the heart of coming of age novels. What makes Homan’s story compelling is her ability to capture the banality of such a time and place—historically as well as developmentally—blending it seamlessly with an internal life of grim tragedy, earnestness, naivety, and bitingly smart observation.”

—Daniel Casey, Manhattan Book Review

“I was reading Burn Fortune—Brandi Homan’s novel about a Midwestern teen’s identification with Jean Seberg’s portrayal of Joan of Arc—during the week that a catastrophic blaze at Notre-Dame de Paris caused the cathedral’s iconic spire to collapse. The Maid of Orléans was burned to death some hundred kilometers away in Rouen, but both of these textual and architectural fires activated complex emotions around history, power structures, privilege, and grief. Burn Fortune is a compelling and necessary examination of these concepts, a meditation on the human costs of heteropatriarchy, and a vital argument about the political implications of narrative itself.”

—Zack Anderson, American Microreviews & Interviews