Krow’s novel revolves around Spokane’s Great Fire

Above : Leyna Krow is the author of the novel “Fire Season.” (Photo/Auntie’s Bookstore)

It’s not as if the worry about the COVID pandemic is over. People are still coming down with it, some bad enough to be hospitalized.

But in many ways, life is getting back to something close to what it was before, say, March of 2020.

For example, Auntie’s Bookstore is once again holding public, in-person book events. At 7 p.m. on Tuesday, in fact, the Spokane-based writer Leyna Krow will appear at The Hive, 2904 E. Sprague Ave., to talk about her novel “Fire Season.”

The event, which will feature a number of additional local authors, requires a ticket, which can be purchased online, at Auntie’s itself or over the phone: (509) 838-0206.

“Fire Season” is set in 1889 during the Great Fire , which leveled some 40 blocks of downtown Spokane Falls. It keys on a bank manager named Barton Heydale contemplating suicide, a con man sent to investigate the origins of the blaze, and a woman seer whom both men fall in love with.

Using prose that is “incantory,” a Kirkus Reviews critic wrote, “The author’s main preoccupation is not with people but with motifs and issues: What is consent? Can good intentions redeem? Is theft in aid of good works moral?”

And a reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote, “The prose is marvelous, and Krow shrewdly shows via Barton, who pretends to be a ‘man in a fine, if not enviable state,’ how the riskiest con is against the self. Readers will be captivated.”

Students can attend free with a valid student ID. But everyone is “encouraged” to wear a mask.

Yeah, times have changed. But maybe not as much as we might want.