Book Review: While We Were Burning by Sara Koffi

Elizabeth Smith has always been something of a loner. Despite having the perfect marriage and job and a seemingly perfect life in the affluent Harbor Town neighborhood of Memphis, Tennessee, she always feels a little dissociated from her neighbors. Gregarious Patricia Fitzgerald is perhaps her best and only friend in the area. So when Elizabeth finds Patricia strung up in front of her house in an apparent suicide, she begins to spiral, having now lost almost all emotional ties to the place where she lives.

Her husband David is her one positive constant, but even he seems to be growing ever more distant from her, especially with her continuing refusal to believe that Patricia killed herself. In an effort to save their marriage, she agrees with his suggestion to hire a personal assistant. Her new assistant will help her cope not only with her job teaching underprivileged kids at the nearby Learning Center, but also with all the details of everyday life that keep slipping out from her grasp in a haze of anxiety and numbing medications.

Enter Brianna Thompson. She’s the perfect assistant: warm, funny and thoroughly professional. Quickly, she becomes so integral to Elizabeth’s life that the latter is often surprised by how little time they’ve actually known each other, as here when Elizabeth takes her to the Learning Center for the first time and is surprised at how impressed Brianna is with the beautiful new building:

But then I remembered that Brianna and I hadn’t been to the Learning Center a million times before.

 

I’d been to the building a million times before, and Brianna had only been working as my assistant for a week.

 

Huh.

 

It was strange how ingrained Brianna already was in my psyche, despite how little we knew each other. Still, I couldn’t pretend like I wasn’t comfortable around her, more comfortable than I felt around the majority of people in my general orbit. As pathetic as it sounded, Brianna was on track to being one of my closest friends in the whole goddamn city.

 

Yep.

 

That sounded pretty fucking pathetic.

Just as Elizabeth begins to think that maybe she shouldn’t be so reliant on only one other person for so many basic things, Brianna surprises her. Elizabeth thought that she’d been doing a good job of keeping her side investigation into Patricia’s death a secret, but clearly not well enough to evade Brianna’s observant eye. Gratifyingly, Brianna believes her theory that Patricia was murdered, and offers to help her figure out whodunnit.

But Brianna has secrets of her own. Her teenage son was killed by the police here in Harbor Town, and Brianna is determined to figure out who made the 911 call that sealed his fate. Elizabeth is her gateway into the neighborhood and, as she gets to know her boss a little better, perhaps the only person Brianna can trust:

Her isolated nature, combined with her work at the Learning Center, made Brianna start to suspect that Elizabeth never would’ve called the cops on a child. Because unlike Patricia’s other friends, Elizabeth would’ve known what calling the cops on a Black child could do, the consequences that could come from it.

 

She was too close to it, too surrounded by it.

 

She just knew better.

 

Which meant that she was the one person who Brianna could rule out.

As the women’s quests for justice intertwine in shocking ways, they find themselves careening towards a showdown that will change their lives forever. Will their burgeoning friendship be able to survive the terrible revelations that lie in store for them?

This was a gripping thriller that provides a nuanced portrait of two very damaged women, both obsessed with uncovering the truth. Sara Koffi’s genius lies in her refusal to ignore the sociocultural aspects of their situations as women of different races and social classes living in the American South. Instead of letting these differences be mere window dressing, they become an integral part of the story, resulting in two protagonists who are deeply troubled yet still somehow sympathetic, as their problems are very much a manifestation of greater societal ills.

To be clear, Ms. Koffi lets neither woman off the hook for what they choose to do. Elizabeth and Brianna are both capable of terrible things, and each winds up in an entirely realistic place at the end of this compelling novel. The fantasy of cut-and-dried justice withers in the face of the punishments the women devise for themselves, in an all-too-common parallel with the ways so many people deal with their own shame and guilt, never owning up to it, but choosing to live with it regardless. While We Were Burning doesn’t quite hit the sociopolitical mark I think it’s aiming for—a generous interpretation of the ending is that white patriarchy gets everything it wants when women let racism divide us—but it’s still an excellent, unflinching look at the state of race relations in America today.