Burning Up

Burning Up

By: Caroline B. Cooney

            Burning up is about a girl named Macy Clare. She lives in Connecticut with her parents and her live right around the corner. This story takes place in 1998. Macy is fifteen years old and realizes that her parents aren’t very exciting, her dad watches the TV and goes to work, and her mom plays on the computer and also works all day.

            When Macy decides she wants to go to grandparents’ house more often she does. When she asks her grandpa what happened to the old burned up barn a crossed the street he tries not to tell her much, but one thing that he does tell her is a man lived in the barn apartment and he was the first black person to ever be in the town. He was a teacher and somehow his barn apartment burned down do to arson.

            When Macy realizes that her grandparent’s neighbor is a cute sixteen year old boy she is happy. When she goes to school and finds out that she and her life skills class are going to a town not to far away from their town and they go to the part of the town known as the “ghetto” to paint a church that is pretty much a day care. When they are painting, one of the workers of the day care looks out the opened doors and sees someone smoking and she runs out to tell them to knock it off be for the place starts on fire when the guy throws the cigarette inside the building when it starts on fire.

            They run through a hall and shut the door from the fire. As Macy is running she feels heat and realizes that her hair is on fire and at that same moment someone puts their shirt over her head. Then she gets to see his face and it’s the cute boy that lives next door to her grandparents. He tells her that his name is Austin.

            After they get home she tells her parents and grandparents what happened and now she is not allowed to go there ever again. As she investigates more on the fire of 1959 she asks herself was it my grandpa that started the fire of the barn because he didn’t want to talk about the fire? Or was it someone who just didn’t like blacks at all? And could it be the same person that started the fire at the church that I was in?