Christine Murphy’s Notes on Surviving the Fire is a novel that burns with righteous fury. It’s an indictment of institutions that fail survivors, meditating on anger, survival, and a tangled web of grief, betrayal, and systemic injustice. Through Sarah’s raw narration, Murphy immerses the reader in the unrelenting exhaustion of trauma and the impossibility of moving forward when the world refuses to hold abusers accountable.

Sarah’s story is not an easy one—assaulted by a fellow student and disbelieved by almost everyone except her best friend Nathan, she navigates a world where justice is a myth and bureaucracy is a barricade. She and Nathan, both former monastics, seek solace in each other and in substances, numbing themselves as Sarah fights to access therapy through a university more invested in protecting its reputation than its students. Nathan’s death, ruled an overdose, fractures what little stability she has left. But when Sarah starts piecing together the circumstances surrounding his death, she finds herself chasing a truth as grim as her own past—one that forces her to reexamine everything she thought she knew about him.

Murphy’s prose is unflinching, blending snarky, defiant interior monologue with searing social commentary. The novel is heavy with grief, rage, and exhaustion, painting a picture of a world where justice is a privilege, not a right. The institutional failures Sarah rails against—Title IX neglect, police indifference, economic inequity—are uncomfortably real, making her anger feel both personal and universal. But for all its thematic weight, the book stumbles under its own ambitions. There’s simply too much crammed in: California wildfires, Sarah’s childhood hunting lessons, her professor stealing her research, Nathan’s sister’s addiction—it’s a chaotic sprawl that never fully weaves together.

And then there’s the ending. The reveal of Nathan’s past lands with a thud, followed quickly by a second plot twist that feels more like shock for the sake of it than a meaningful conclusion. The novel asks whether redemption is possible, but its answer is muddled, buried beneath an ending that feels unnecessarily gruesome.

For all its ambition, Notes on Surviving the Fire didn’t work for me. Murphy’s writing is undeniably powerful, but the novel’s structure is too scattered, its twists too abrupt, its trauma too relentless without enough moments of respite. Some readers might find it cathartic—I just found it a bit tiring.