What do you think?
BURN
“BURN is filled with beautiful losers covered in scars of their own making. And yet it also finds hope in the dark places, both real and in the mind. A stunning, assured, and risky debut.”
-Tod Goldberg, New York Times bestselling author
The Mountains. 1999. Shannon Story returns to college from winter break, happy because she has an escape plan for her mother who is trapped in an abusive marriage. Instead of salvation, Shannon finds herself facing extreme fire her car breaks down on the side of the road, her would-be boyfriend abandons her, and the unusually dry winter in the mountains shows no sign of letting up. When she meets the hotshot, a wildland firefighter, on the night of her 21st birthday, she thinks maybe this is the guy who will save her. To no one’s surprise (except maybe Shannon’s) he sends her into the mother of all downward spirals putting at risk her remaining Daniel, her best friend and emotional boyfriend; Rebecca, her sex-crazed roommate; Adrian, her struggling artist friend and Daniel’s roommate; and finally, her mother, whose refusal to recognize her own pathology will not just sink herself, but her daughter. After the last cigarette goes out and the party blows up, Shannon is forced to make a the life her mother (un/knowingly) conditioned her to accept or the life she can live on her own terms but only if she faces a reckoning of the painful codependent cycle she's been living inside.
“BURN is gritty, pretty and real, highly entertaining—like a ‘beach read,’ only if the beach were a good dive bar, BURN is a novel to sink into and enjoy every moment.”
–Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl
“Clear your once you pick up BURN, you won’t put it down until the final, aching word. In Shannon, Stephanie Austin has created an antiheroine for the ages, a young woman equally bent on self-destruction and surviving any way she can. I saw parts of myself in her I didn’t want to see, and I couldn’t look away.”
–Jennifer Wortman, author of This. This. This. Is.
Love. Love. Love.
“Stephanie Austin’s BURN is a raw, unforgettable debut novel that ignites from the first page and never lets go. Step into Shannon’s chaotic world—a gritty, heartbreaking journey that doubles as a love letter to the 90s. These characters will steal your heart, break it, and make you laugh through the tears. Austin’s writing is fearless and devastatingly beautiful, cementing her place among today’s most powerful voices. BURN doesn’t just tell a story—it consumes you, leaving you scorched and begging for more. This is a debut ready to set the literary world ablaze.”
–Danny Goodman, author of Amerikaland
“In BURN, Austin jolts the reader into the mind of Shannon, a lonely young woman whose every attempt at connection leaves her more isolated than before. Set in the grimy and hypnotic world of 90’s college-age partying, Burn asks how anyone raised amid sexualized violence can ever escape its patterns, even when they recognize them. A heartbreaking novel, BURN will leave a reader singed but ultimately hopeful for women who must navigate the world with a smashed compass.”
–Amanda Bales author of Pekolah Stories
“Stephanie Austin's BURN is a gripping and unforgettable journey of transformation.
-Tod Goldberg, New York Times bestselling author
The Mountains. 1999. Shannon Story returns to college from winter break, happy because she has an escape plan for her mother who is trapped in an abusive marriage. Instead of salvation, Shannon finds herself facing extreme fire her car breaks down on the side of the road, her would-be boyfriend abandons her, and the unusually dry winter in the mountains shows no sign of letting up. When she meets the hotshot, a wildland firefighter, on the night of her 21st birthday, she thinks maybe this is the guy who will save her. To no one’s surprise (except maybe Shannon’s) he sends her into the mother of all downward spirals putting at risk her remaining Daniel, her best friend and emotional boyfriend; Rebecca, her sex-crazed roommate; Adrian, her struggling artist friend and Daniel’s roommate; and finally, her mother, whose refusal to recognize her own pathology will not just sink herself, but her daughter. After the last cigarette goes out and the party blows up, Shannon is forced to make a the life her mother (un/knowingly) conditioned her to accept or the life she can live on her own terms but only if she faces a reckoning of the painful codependent cycle she's been living inside.
“BURN is gritty, pretty and real, highly entertaining—like a ‘beach read,’ only if the beach were a good dive bar, BURN is a novel to sink into and enjoy every moment.”
–Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl
“Clear your once you pick up BURN, you won’t put it down until the final, aching word. In Shannon, Stephanie Austin has created an antiheroine for the ages, a young woman equally bent on self-destruction and surviving any way she can. I saw parts of myself in her I didn’t want to see, and I couldn’t look away.”
–Jennifer Wortman, author of This. This. This. Is.
Love. Love. Love.
“Stephanie Austin’s BURN is a raw, unforgettable debut novel that ignites from the first page and never lets go. Step into Shannon’s chaotic world—a gritty, heartbreaking journey that doubles as a love letter to the 90s. These characters will steal your heart, break it, and make you laugh through the tears. Austin’s writing is fearless and devastatingly beautiful, cementing her place among today’s most powerful voices. BURN doesn’t just tell a story—it consumes you, leaving you scorched and begging for more. This is a debut ready to set the literary world ablaze.”
–Danny Goodman, author of Amerikaland
“In BURN, Austin jolts the reader into the mind of Shannon, a lonely young woman whose every attempt at connection leaves her more isolated than before. Set in the grimy and hypnotic world of 90’s college-age partying, Burn asks how anyone raised amid sexualized violence can ever escape its patterns, even when they recognize them. A heartbreaking novel, BURN will leave a reader singed but ultimately hopeful for women who must navigate the world with a smashed compass.”
–Amanda Bales author of Pekolah Stories
“Stephanie Austin's BURN is a gripping and unforgettable journey of transformation.
217 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 3, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 4, 2026
Burn is a perceptive and sad novel about a self-destructive young woman living off-campus in a blighted Colorado college town in 1999. It captures precisely the all-too-human blend of insight and obliviousness, self-discovery and self-delusion, that most of us bumble through in our late teens and early twenties.
A number of unpleasant things happen in the book. Cars don’t start and have to be abandoned at gas stations. Best friends confess their love and ruin everything. A minor house fire. Being hit on by a middle-aged man in a casino. Bills. Shitty phone calls. Frankly, little happens that isn’t unpleasant on one level or another.
There is a vivid, viscerally awful rape scene. The rapist does not exactly understand what he’s done. He’s hoping for a second date. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing ambiguous about the rape itself. It’s just that American culture sanctioned rape in the nineties, actually. And because rape is a crime, and crime is by definition unsanctioned, very many rapes became impossible even as they were lived, leaving victim and perpetrator alike, albeit in very different ways, caught in a kind of paradox between lived reality and the story they were left telling about it.
What is most remarkable about Burn is how buoyant it somehow remains, despite the fact that every single thing that happens in it is upsetting. Not that the book is in any way light. But there is something effervescent about it, the precise source of which is hard to pin down. It’s not irony or snark—cheap thrills so beloved of contemporary authors. It’s not even humor, really. It’s love, maybe—the author’s love for her characters, her story, this magnificent and miserable world.
Burn was a pure impulse buy. Stephanie Austin has a substack. I don’t subscribe (I’m not really interested in writers writing about writing online), but someone must have shared it. I clicked a link to Burn, liked the cover, and clicked “buy now.”
The novel is clearly a labor of love. According to her acknowledgments, Austin has been working on it since 2006. Twenty years. And, I hate to say it, but the novel feels like it was conceived in 2006. Had it been published then—on the bleeding edge of the wave of feminist energy that would eventually snowball into “woke,” it would have felt very fresh. And I wish—I really wish—that I could say Stephanie Austin missed the boat. She should have made her novel work in 2007, had it on shelves in 2008. It’s too late. Old news. But now—indeed, on the very newsletter platform where Austin is trying to get some traction for her decades’ labor, but also in the heart of the Federal Government, and on what’s left of television, and apparently at hipster parties in Brooklyn, and everywhere else—rape culture is on the ascent. Men—and plenty of women—are denigrating, in fierce and uncompromising terms, the movement that, whatever its excesses, tried—tried, and for a moment looked like it might even succeed—at finding a way out of the soul killing misery and delusion that was America’s culture of sex at the turn of the twenty-first century. The almost unbelievable ugliness of how that culture spoke about and pictured young women. Now it’s 2026, and politicians, so-called “Christians,” countless online personalities—their souls twisted into knots by the vacuous, frenetic virtual spaces they’ve fluttered into like so many moths to the blue light—celebrate a soul-devouring, woman-hating vision of masculinity-as-entitlement, look back longingly on a world in which women “knew their place,” masturbate furiously to the dystopian nightmare that is contemporary internet pornography. In a moment when so many men so very obviously need to find their way to a healthy and generative vision of masculine pride, honor, integrity, love, humility, they offer nothing, less than nothing, bullshit, poison.
I suppose this is where I should say Burn feels necessary. Important. But that’s not right. Burn feels suffocating. It feels like a breath of air. A damp rag. A flame. A tower of dishes in an off-campus apartment kitchen that has literally never been properly cleaned. A world without cell phones. The kind of yard sale that is inexplicably good, with things that someone might actually want. Used condoms under the bed. The kind of art college kids make who aren’t really serious about it but don’t know that yet. The future, the past, the desert, falling in love with an asshole, falling in love with a friend. None of it is necessary, it just is.
A number of unpleasant things happen in the book. Cars don’t start and have to be abandoned at gas stations. Best friends confess their love and ruin everything. A minor house fire. Being hit on by a middle-aged man in a casino. Bills. Shitty phone calls. Frankly, little happens that isn’t unpleasant on one level or another.
There is a vivid, viscerally awful rape scene. The rapist does not exactly understand what he’s done. He’s hoping for a second date. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing ambiguous about the rape itself. It’s just that American culture sanctioned rape in the nineties, actually. And because rape is a crime, and crime is by definition unsanctioned, very many rapes became impossible even as they were lived, leaving victim and perpetrator alike, albeit in very different ways, caught in a kind of paradox between lived reality and the story they were left telling about it.
What is most remarkable about Burn is how buoyant it somehow remains, despite the fact that every single thing that happens in it is upsetting. Not that the book is in any way light. But there is something effervescent about it, the precise source of which is hard to pin down. It’s not irony or snark—cheap thrills so beloved of contemporary authors. It’s not even humor, really. It’s love, maybe—the author’s love for her characters, her story, this magnificent and miserable world.
Burn was a pure impulse buy. Stephanie Austin has a substack. I don’t subscribe (I’m not really interested in writers writing about writing online), but someone must have shared it. I clicked a link to Burn, liked the cover, and clicked “buy now.”
The novel is clearly a labor of love. According to her acknowledgments, Austin has been working on it since 2006. Twenty years. And, I hate to say it, but the novel feels like it was conceived in 2006. Had it been published then—on the bleeding edge of the wave of feminist energy that would eventually snowball into “woke,” it would have felt very fresh. And I wish—I really wish—that I could say Stephanie Austin missed the boat. She should have made her novel work in 2007, had it on shelves in 2008. It’s too late. Old news. But now—indeed, on the very newsletter platform where Austin is trying to get some traction for her decades’ labor, but also in the heart of the Federal Government, and on what’s left of television, and apparently at hipster parties in Brooklyn, and everywhere else—rape culture is on the ascent. Men—and plenty of women—are denigrating, in fierce and uncompromising terms, the movement that, whatever its excesses, tried—tried, and for a moment looked like it might even succeed—at finding a way out of the soul killing misery and delusion that was America’s culture of sex at the turn of the twenty-first century. The almost unbelievable ugliness of how that culture spoke about and pictured young women. Now it’s 2026, and politicians, so-called “Christians,” countless online personalities—their souls twisted into knots by the vacuous, frenetic virtual spaces they’ve fluttered into like so many moths to the blue light—celebrate a soul-devouring, woman-hating vision of masculinity-as-entitlement, look back longingly on a world in which women “knew their place,” masturbate furiously to the dystopian nightmare that is contemporary internet pornography. In a moment when so many men so very obviously need to find their way to a healthy and generative vision of masculine pride, honor, integrity, love, humility, they offer nothing, less than nothing, bullshit, poison.
I suppose this is where I should say Burn feels necessary. Important. But that’s not right. Burn feels suffocating. It feels like a breath of air. A damp rag. A flame. A tower of dishes in an off-campus apartment kitchen that has literally never been properly cleaned. A world without cell phones. The kind of yard sale that is inexplicably good, with things that someone might actually want. Used condoms under the bed. The kind of art college kids make who aren’t really serious about it but don’t know that yet. The future, the past, the desert, falling in love with an asshole, falling in love with a friend. None of it is necessary, it just is.
April 13, 2026
great story that’s well written with a fresh voice and pov. there are many hemingway/sun also rises references here, enough that i thought austin may be playing around with a retelling from lady bret ashley’s perspective. she’s not though and the book is better for it. instead this is a surprisingly fun and delightfully weird portrayal of campus drama in the late 90s.
February 10, 2026
BURN is a true coming-of-age novel, taking place in the late 90s, when college is almost ending for the main character, Shannon, and the pressure to figure out her life’s direction leads to an unraveling. We are cast headfirst into this heartbreaking journey of self-destruction, with a voice that is both fierce and vulnerable, tender and sharp, witty and insightful. It is a book I couldn’t put down, couldn’t look away from, rooting for Shannon to reconcile the abuse she endured from her stepfather, a man whom her mother can’t break free of, even with Shannon’s help. Growing up in a house of fear from his abuse, and concern for her mother’s safety, we start to see the consequences it has on Shannon and her relationships. We see the secret code she and her mother share in an act of self-preservation, and ultimately her mother’s inability to leave her abuser. These small and heartbreaking gestures seem to blur where her mother ends and Shannon begins. Shannon chases the blurred edges, perpetually in an alcoholic haze, lighting one cigarette after another, running from one bar to another, in a literal cloud of smoke, seeking validation in all the wrong places. Taking note of her surroundings with a sharpness that ceases to be dulled, her inner dialogue is filled with devastating lines, insightful commentary, and the heartbreaking reality that there are no saviors, there only choices we can make—and sometimes you have to burn it all down.
March 17, 2026
The inner dialogue of the narrator was what really made the book go from good to great for me. She was full of insights and witticisms that only added a layer of clarity to the chaotic events within the timeline. I found the story to be part self-discovery, part self-delusion, which makes sense given the narrator’s relatively young age.
Visceral and raw, this novel isn’t for the faint of heart. I could faintly taste the warm liquor and smell the secondhand smoke from the tip of a cigarette as I progressed through this story. The best part of the book, in my opinion, was the fact that despite all the horrible events that take place, I was never tempted to put the book down and take a break. I had to keep going in order to see what happened. I finished the book in three sittings over the course of a week.
Burn is full of questionable decisions. Failed relationships and bad actors, which should’ve made me depressed but in Austin’s capable hands, it left me feeling grateful for the chance to read it. They say that only a fool doesn’t learn from past mistakes, but it takes a wise one to make something so beautiful out of them.
Equal parts love letter to the nineties and ode to the ultimate anti-heroine, Shannon, Burn left me feeling queasy much like after a wild rollercoaster. I’m just happy I took the ride.
Stephanie has a book coming out next year, which I’ll be lined up to pre-order.
Visceral and raw, this novel isn’t for the faint of heart. I could faintly taste the warm liquor and smell the secondhand smoke from the tip of a cigarette as I progressed through this story. The best part of the book, in my opinion, was the fact that despite all the horrible events that take place, I was never tempted to put the book down and take a break. I had to keep going in order to see what happened. I finished the book in three sittings over the course of a week.
Burn is full of questionable decisions. Failed relationships and bad actors, which should’ve made me depressed but in Austin’s capable hands, it left me feeling grateful for the chance to read it. They say that only a fool doesn’t learn from past mistakes, but it takes a wise one to make something so beautiful out of them.
Equal parts love letter to the nineties and ode to the ultimate anti-heroine, Shannon, Burn left me feeling queasy much like after a wild rollercoaster. I’m just happy I took the ride.
Stephanie has a book coming out next year, which I’ll be lined up to pre-order.
March 31, 2026
If you came of reading and drinking age in the 90’s, this is definitely a book for you. It captures that time perfectly and took me back especially at every mention of a cd. I found I couldn't put it down. It starts off, perhaps ‘fun’ isn’t quite the right word, but it’s a lighter tone that nonetheless manages to convey what messes we all were back then. And around college age, at least for me anyways, is when it begins to dawn on you just how much worse girls have it. All the awful shit they have to deal with, which Burn takes us through a sort of crash course of over a couple months. Many a time I paused over the page to ask yet again ‘why are so many dudes so awful?’ and there’s a truly horrific stepdad, like just the worst kind of human being. On the other side of that, I was really bothered by just how much I related to the ‘nice guy’ of Daniel lol. Burn is intense, it’s a lot, but it’s a very good read, taking me right back to those days. I cringed the entire lead up to Shannon's arrival at the wedding so well done there, Ms. Austin. There’s also lovely passages like this one on page 73 that I made a note of - “Stop. Put my hands on my hips and breathe and feel the dark. The dark is where you put all the terrible things. The monsters. You stuff them in, push them down, push hard, harder, and when they still don’t fit, you release a part of yourself down with them because you understand that’s the only way to make them stay.”
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April 19, 2026We do love a protagonist who doesn't have her sh*t together.
Shannon is a self saboteur, who burn everyone around in some way or other. We don't always understand exactly why, but some of her formative relationships are... problematic, and that seems to inoculate her against sustained emotional intimacy.
There is an un-put-downable quality, especially to the second half of this, as all of Shannon's behavior comes back to bite her. Can she be redeemed? Will her friendships survive? Will she actually quit smoking?
No spoilers. But I do enjoy a book that ends with a gesture to resolution rather than fixing every little thing (which is unrealistic.)
Add to the shelf next to Ottessa Moshfegh.
Shannon is a self saboteur, who burn everyone around in some way or other. We don't always understand exactly why, but some of her formative relationships are... problematic, and that seems to inoculate her against sustained emotional intimacy.
There is an un-put-downable quality, especially to the second half of this, as all of Shannon's behavior comes back to bite her. Can she be redeemed? Will her friendships survive? Will she actually quit smoking?
No spoilers. But I do enjoy a book that ends with a gesture to resolution rather than fixing every little thing (which is unrealistic.)
Add to the shelf next to Ottessa Moshfegh.
March 20, 2026
Taking place in Arizona in the late winter of 1999, Burn is anti-nostalgia at its finest. Our protagonist Shannon’s problems are profound. Her self-loathing is real and sad and so, so easy to understand. She is broken, her mom is broken, her friends are broken, just like all of us. Though an ethereal sadness permeates the book and I often find myself saying, “Oh no, don’t do that,” I always, always, understand why they do what they shouldn’t do. We were all young once, after all. It’s unapologetic, brutal, and above all, honest.
April 4, 2026
In BURN, Stephanie Austin has captured a time (late 90s) and a place (small college town) and characters (Shannon, struggling with the legacy of her mother's bad choices and now, her own; and a litany of friends and lovers we all recognize) so perfectly, I genuinely felt I was amongst the cast of characters. Her attention to detail is pristine and she does not shy away from the hard choices women are so often faced with in life. An effortless, yet thought-provoking read that had me turning the pages to find out how Shannon's myriad issues would resolve.
Highly recommend!
Highly recommend!
May 3, 2026
A great Gen X novel. Possibly THE great Gen X novel. Burn follows a college student on a downward spiral, absolutely raw dogging her way through life—maxing out credit cards, hooking up with Olive Garden waiters, skipping class, skipping work, smoking cigarettes, getting blackout drunk at sports bars, buying pregnancy tests at Walgreens after midnight—all in those final, analog days before iPhones and social media. Tremendous.
May 22, 2026
I’m not sure I’ve encountered a book that *tastes * so much like cigarettes—capturing nostalgia and a sense cringe in all the warmest, grossest, most satisfying ways.
Add Burn to your reading list ASAP.
Add Burn to your reading list ASAP.
September 14, 2026
Austin’s debut novel is marvelously written and paced, and blessed with a truly memorable narrator (Shannon Story, even her name is great!) whose perfectly calibrated voice makes hairpin turns from sarcastic to anxious to world-weary to callow, often in the space of a single paragraph.
March 14, 2026
This book is for everyone who was lost and shitty and hurt and hurtful in their 20s. Also, it was the 90s and there were lots of cigarettes.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews