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Burn Fortune
In the novel-in-fragments, BURN FORTUNE, 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 emotionally and physically abusive. Looking for alternatives to the lives of the women who surround her, June becomes obsessed with the actress Jean Seberg (best known for her starring role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless) as well as Joan of Arc. After being raped by an acquaintance, June withdraws and begins to live mostly 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—literally and metaphorically?
212 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2019
About the author
Brandi Homan
7 books18 followersBrandi Homan is the author of the novel BURN FORTUNE, forthcoming from CLASH Books in May 2019. She holds a PhD in English, Creative Writing (Fiction), from the University of Denver and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. She is the author of two books of poetry, Hard Reds (2008) and Bobcat Country (2010), from Shearsman Books. With her husband and daughter, she lives in the suburbs of Denver, where she thinks about the Midwest and misses drinking Yellow no. 5.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 3, 2020
This book is intense. It's so focused, everything it can muster all at once. You can see a poetry influence in the sparse nature of the prose, and/or perhaps flash. It really contributes to the force of the emotion and evocation, along with the imagery and the gravity of the narrative. Very nicely done.
June 24, 2019
Terrific Book! -- Marvelous structure, consistently vivid voice (first-person narrative), masterly use of suggestion, poetry infused page layouts and prose -- Page 178: "A scrapbook of my lives whose smell lingers like rust in the cracks of my fingers." -- A story set in the Midwest (USA), circa 1990s.
July 2, 2021
Burn Fortune is a small wonder; an exercise in concision that nonetheless contains worlds. Written in tight, punchy bursts of poetic wit and poignantly relatable teen angst, it reads like the highly curated diary of a precocious young woman in a hell of a spot. Through the sharp, tilt-shift lens of the smalltown 1990's midwest - a place which author Brandi Homan renders painfully (and at times hilariously) authentic via deadpan descriptions of flag corps politics, beer runs to the Kum & Go, and hot Summers spent de-tasseling corn - we get to know June, a girl with the (again, expertly rendered) kind of nebulous big dreams that only smalltown teenagers know how to have; that sense that there has to be more of something, anything, somewhere out there, and that you're surely destined for all of it if you could only figure out where to go. It's not until the local librarian introduces her to the films of Jean Seberg (an Iowa native who escaped to France to become the iconic star of such films as Breathless and Saint Joan) that June begins to think more deeply about what she wants, and how to get it.
The sections in which she watches Seberg's films could almost pass for Live Tweeting sessions, and her by turns entranced and exasperated commentary injects her increasingly desperate circumstances (abusive boyfriend, sexual assault, possible unwanted pregnancy) with a brilliant levity that will make you want to watch right along with her (I for one will be checking out Paint Your Wagon ASAP). And while the thing this book maybe does best is depict the ways in which even the smartest people can find themselves hemmed in on all sides by seemingly inescapable circumstance - by a town, or a house, or a family, or even a single destructive person - what June finds in Jean (and specifically in her portrayal of Joan of Arc) is the will to break free of it all. To defy fate, raise high her battle flag, and fly like the prairie wind, because small towns hold on the tightest - to young women most of all - and absolutely no one gets out without a fight.
The sections in which she watches Seberg's films could almost pass for Live Tweeting sessions, and her by turns entranced and exasperated commentary injects her increasingly desperate circumstances (abusive boyfriend, sexual assault, possible unwanted pregnancy) with a brilliant levity that will make you want to watch right along with her (I for one will be checking out Paint Your Wagon ASAP). And while the thing this book maybe does best is depict the ways in which even the smartest people can find themselves hemmed in on all sides by seemingly inescapable circumstance - by a town, or a house, or a family, or even a single destructive person - what June finds in Jean (and specifically in her portrayal of Joan of Arc) is the will to break free of it all. To defy fate, raise high her battle flag, and fly like the prairie wind, because small towns hold on the tightest - to young women most of all - and absolutely no one gets out without a fight.
October 9, 2020
In this star of a novel, Brandi Homan fuses mind-bending arthouse elements with Midwestern teenage angst and ennui, to create an avatar of Jean Seberg, along with the characters she portrayed. Through scorching minimalist prose, we watch as June sloughs off the stuff of John Hughes to become a kind of Persephone, kidnapping herself not to the land of the dead, but to the dark recesses where those who are actually living reside.
October 3, 2019
the ending made me sad
December 3, 2024
You know when you get to the last page in a book, finish reading, then turn immediately back to page one and start again? That’s the experience I had with Burn Fortune by Brandi Homan from CLASH BOOKS (2019). This work of fiction, won the 2020 Colorado Book Award in Literary fiction and was named Best New Colorado Novel by Denver's Westword (2020) defies neat classification by genre.
Part coming-of-age, part women’s literature, all literary fiction, this book tells the tale of sixteen-year-old June, living in the 90s in a small Midwestern in connected vignettes, or, as the publisher calls it, a novel-in-fragments. You can read the official description below my signature or watch the trailer here.
A key piece of June’s story is sexual assault, which is gestured at rather than explicitly explored, echoing the way people often respond to the trauma of sexual violence. The resulting prose reflects the dissociation June experiences after the incident, and it is also when her obsession and identification with Jean Seberg, an actress from the same small town, consumes her.
She begins her obsession with the actress asking, “How do you start from here and end up there?” Yet as June grapples with the aftermath of her trauma, the boundaries between her life, the actress, and the character of Joan of Arc, played by Seberg, become entwined in a type of dysfunctional trinity and through a mix of dreams, movie scenes and images, and story.
Through this fragmented lens, June explores what she can’t face, deciding that “around here the only way to speak is to leave and if you leave you burn. Ain’t nobody rising from the ashes.” Ultimately, she reflects “Joan chose to burn,” before creating her own safe space in the hollow of a culvert and lighting a circle of candles around herself.
The story ends with June looking into the lens of a camera, finger on the button saying “Light your fire,” in a kind of ambiguous climax that leaves the reader satisfied with the unanswered questions the novel presents. After reading, I was caught up thinking about the book and themes for days—which, for me, is the best way to feel after reading a novel.
I strongly recommend this book for anyone on your holiday list who enjoys literary fiction. It’s also a wonderful read for writers, as the different approach Homan takes in the novel’s structure/plot is interesting, refreshing, and inspiring.
It’s also a good read for anyone who enjoys poetic prose. Homan’s background as a poet shines through every page of this novel, which could almost be classified as a collection of linked prose poems.
And prose poems are plentiful in her second full collection, Bobcat Country (Shearsman Books, 2010). You can find it, Burn Fortune, and her first poetry collection, Hard Reds (Shearsman Books, 2008) on their respective publisher’s websites. Or support local businesses and ask for these books at your local indie bookstore!
Part coming-of-age, part women’s literature, all literary fiction, this book tells the tale of sixteen-year-old June, living in the 90s in a small Midwestern in connected vignettes, or, as the publisher calls it, a novel-in-fragments. You can read the official description below my signature or watch the trailer here.
A key piece of June’s story is sexual assault, which is gestured at rather than explicitly explored, echoing the way people often respond to the trauma of sexual violence. The resulting prose reflects the dissociation June experiences after the incident, and it is also when her obsession and identification with Jean Seberg, an actress from the same small town, consumes her.
She begins her obsession with the actress asking, “How do you start from here and end up there?” Yet as June grapples with the aftermath of her trauma, the boundaries between her life, the actress, and the character of Joan of Arc, played by Seberg, become entwined in a type of dysfunctional trinity and through a mix of dreams, movie scenes and images, and story.
Through this fragmented lens, June explores what she can’t face, deciding that “around here the only way to speak is to leave and if you leave you burn. Ain’t nobody rising from the ashes.” Ultimately, she reflects “Joan chose to burn,” before creating her own safe space in the hollow of a culvert and lighting a circle of candles around herself.
The story ends with June looking into the lens of a camera, finger on the button saying “Light your fire,” in a kind of ambiguous climax that leaves the reader satisfied with the unanswered questions the novel presents. After reading, I was caught up thinking about the book and themes for days—which, for me, is the best way to feel after reading a novel.
I strongly recommend this book for anyone on your holiday list who enjoys literary fiction. It’s also a wonderful read for writers, as the different approach Homan takes in the novel’s structure/plot is interesting, refreshing, and inspiring.
It’s also a good read for anyone who enjoys poetic prose. Homan’s background as a poet shines through every page of this novel, which could almost be classified as a collection of linked prose poems.
And prose poems are plentiful in her second full collection, Bobcat Country (Shearsman Books, 2010). You can find it, Burn Fortune, and her first poetry collection, Hard Reds (Shearsman Books, 2008) on their respective publisher’s websites. Or support local businesses and ask for these books at your local indie bookstore!
July 2, 2020
It's not the book's fault. I'm just too old for this form. I can see that I would probably have liked this when I was much younger.
December 5, 2021
Just finished Brandi Homan’s BURN FORTUNE and I’m going to be thinking about this book for a long time. Highly recommend. Evocative & powerful.
January 4, 2023
Really grew on me and was good. Brief snapshots of a young American life in suburbia.
July 21, 2026
tiny snapshots of a girl gone mad from boredom. captures so much with so few words.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews