Our House is on Fire
Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
The profoundly moving story of how love, courage and determination brought Greta Thunberg's family back from the brink
'Urgent, lucid, courageous ... a must-read message of hope ... It is a glimpse of a saner world' David Mitchell, Guardian
This is the story of a happy family whose life suddenly fell apart, never to be the same again. Of two devoted parents plunged into a waking nightmare as their eleven-year-old daughter Greta stopped speaking and eating, and her younger sister struggled to cope.
They desperately searched for answers, and began to see how their children's suffering reached far beyond medical diagnoses. This crisis was not theirs alone: they were burned-out people on a burned-out planet. And so they decided to act.
Our House is on Fire shows how, amid forces that tried to silence them, one family found ways to strengthen, heal, and gain courage from the love they had for each other - and for the living world. It is a parable of hope and determination in an emergency that affects us all.
Customer Reviews
Well written
Well written and informative.
Poetry about the end of the world
Poetry... full of sadness and truth and hope and inevitability, like the best always is. About systems that mostly work (science), systems that sometimes work (medicine, social support) and systems that no longer work (economic and political), not when humanity is well on it's way to extinction.
Our House is on Fire
Malena Ernman, Greta Thunberg’s mother, suggests in the Prologue that the family should perhaps have waited to tell their story. They chose not to because of the urgency of the climate crisis and the world’s willful deafness. However, distance would have benefited this impassioned narration.
I wholeheartedly support Greta’s stand, admire the lucidity with which she martials facts, the clarity of her argument and the determination with which she sees off her critics. I had hoped for family autobiography which illuminates their history, trajectory and principles. Yes, they are there, but in the blinding glare of headlights, in the purple prose of melodrama. In conclusion, I felt I learned nothing that I had not read in newspaper articles but was instead disenchanted by the prose.
I fear that Our House is on Fire will play right into the hands of the right-wing. Greta and Beata do appear as two deeply troubled, profoundly self-indulged children in a family and a country of plenty.
It is a basic commonplace told to every aspiring writer, ‘show not tell’. This book is rich in telling, emotional, melodramatic rhetoric which is profoundly off-putting.