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We're all just one bad decision away from disaster

For as long as 14-year-old Robin Fisher can remember, she has lived by her insurance salesman father's credo, happy to live the American Dream and catalogue everyday calamities under “Bad Things that Happen to Other People.” But life in 1970s Golden, California doesn't prove so golden after her father abandons the family, setting in motion a series of events that results in Robin accidentally setting fire to an abandoned party house. Seemingly overnight, she discovers that earthquakes or the possibility of electrocution are nothing compared to the hazards of high school or coming home to a family that is suddenly one member short. As Robin struggles to keep an eye on her fixation with Bic lighters and her newly independent mother's own growing pains, she is drawn into the orbit of Carol “Jesus Freak” Closter, a vulnerable yet powerfully charismatic classmate whose friendship will challenge Robin in ways she could never have imagined. When Carol finally crosses a dangerous line, Robin must make a heartbreaking decision of her own.

In the tradition of Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness, Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals, and Marjorie Celona's Y, and set against the shadow of the Vietnam War and the changing social mores of 1970s America, Prayers for Pyros follows the tumultuous coming of age of both a mother and a daughter, at a time when womanhood itself was coming of age. Hilarious, insightful, and deeply moving, it illuminates those unforgettable moments in life when everything changes, whether we want it to or not.

JESSICA RAYA's first novel Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club (Grand Central Publishing, 2007) was published in four languages under the pseudonym Jessica Morrison and was selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2007. Her early short stories appeared in Room and Zygote. Most recently, she contributed an essay to the highly praised YA collection What My Father Gave Me (Annick Press, 2010). She received a Canada Council grant for her fiction writing in 2003 and was recently offered a residency at the acclaimed Playa program in Oregon. She holds a Masters in English from Simon Fraser University.