And When She Speaks: On ‘Fire Season’
The central character in Leyna Krow’s debut novel Fire Season is a schoolteacher-turned-prostitute-turned-swindler named Roslyn, who happens to be in possession of certain supernatural abilities. It is 1889 in the frontier town of Spokane Falls. At first, in a stroke of structural genius, Krow hides Roslyn from us in plain sight. She appears in the first sentence of chapter one, an offhand reference in our introduction to one of her johns, a put-upon banker who occupies our attention for the first act of the novel. Krow does not yet ask us to notice Roslyn, an alcoholic prophetess. Instead, Roslyn skulks about in the corners of other characters’ stories until the last third of the novel, at which point she drifts to centerstage and everything falls into place around her.
The story of the has conventionally been the story of a certain kind of man: self-possessed, independent, and therefore powerful. The first two acts of orbit around two such men: the put-upon banker and
