Burn the Place by Iliana Regan **** (of 4)

 Place this book in the category of Who-like cries (Horton Hears a Who, Dr. Seuss) from fly-over country: "We are here. We are here." Like Tara Westover's Educated and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, Regan's Burn the Place is a coming of age story for an alcoholic child of a dysfunctional family. And like Westover and Vance, she succeeds against odds that seem unfairly stacked against her: untreated mental health issues, growing up lesbian (and perhaps trans) in religious, rural Indiana, discordant parents, and excessive self-medication with drugs, alcohol, and sex. 

Regan's recounting of childhood, puberty, and early adulthood are presented with bare-faced honesty and without polish. Burn the Place is not crafted as a morality tale like other books of the genre. Rather, pluck and luck seem to be Regan's saving graces. She might just have easily ended up dead in a drunken car crash. Instead of dying, she hones a life based on an intrinsic understanding of food, especially consumables that can be grown, pickled, harvested, foraged, and assembled (after endless experimentation and observation) into creations as novel as Mozart's symphonies were in his time.

It is Regan's patent honesty that resonates and lifts her story above its midwestern roots. For some coastal readers, the specifics of the decay of middle American countryside will be as foreign as a book about Pakistani tribesmen. Nevertheless, Regan's battle to find inner peace and self-love is so universal, that only small tweaks would make this story as applicable to a LatinX Bostonian with a penchant for auto design or a Senegalese from a broken home in the Bronx who might become actually become Hollywood's best costume designer.