About This Book:
A lyrical and empowering biography on Deanne Shulman, America’s first female smokejumper.
Deanne loved being outdoors.
With her family, she spent summers sailing the Salton Sea and backpacking the Sierra Nevada Mountains. As she grew older, her love of nature only grew. So when the heat rose each fire season and the blazes burned near and far, she noticed. Deanne knew she had to do her part in fighting the fires. She spent years on woodland crews, clearing brush and branches that could make the fire spread, and on hotshot crews where she fought faster fires and took bigger risks, spending weeks in one-hundred-degree heat working twenty-four-hour shifts. But what Deanne really wanted was to be a smokejumper, to jump from planes and parachute into dangerous wildfires that no truck could ever reach. To be the first line of defense. The only problem? There had never been a female smokejumper before.
With lyrical text from Jessica Lawson and striking illustrations from Sarah Gonzales, Ablaze tells the story of Deanne Shulman’s groundbreaking work with the United States Forest Service as she fought against unfair rules and blazed the way for women in firefighting.
*Review Contributed By Karen Yingling, Staff Reviewer*
Timely intersection of natural disasters and women’s rights.
The illustrations are rendered in yellows and oranges, and have a smoky, soft focused look to them that makes the book feel very steamy! There is plenty of good information about wild fires, and also about what the job of fighting them entails. Seeing Deanne as a young child enables readers to put themselves in her boots and equipment. It would have been nice to have the years that various events happened right in the text, but younger readers won’t necessarily miss them.
Given the number of wildfires that have made the news in the US, this is a great picture book biography about a woman who broadened opportunities for others. It’s a great choice not only for Women’s History Month, but for Young readers interested in firefighting or forestry work, and would be a great nonfiction accompaniment to books like Rose’s The Burning Season.
