There are books which are hard to read, but you are glad that you soldiered through them.

The book begins with the chronicle of the Fort McMurray Fire in Alberta, which started as a forest fire that was considered far from catastrophic but grew to incredible proportions and ended up consuming almost 1.5 million acres.The book is incredibly hard to read at the beginning.The impending doom and the absolute lack of preparedness of the town make for a stark dichotomy. At one point, officials refused to call in firefighters from Slave Lake who had dealt with a similar fire 5 years before to keep costs low, since Slave Lake firefighters were paid 3 times as much as at Fort McMurray.They say you are often left with one or two sentences when you read a book. This one left many etched in my mind.… hearing a wildfire burn sounds like listening to a freight train passing you by…… the firefighters decided to create a firebreak inside the city by running a bulldozer through some houses. For each of us, our house is our memory palace and as the firefighters were driving through the homes they could see the contents of the home spill out, photos, books, sofas and beds. Things that were a part of someone’s life and their personality lay strewn all over the street…