We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire

Summary

Joy McCullough’s We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire is a dual-narrative novel in verse that refuses to offer its readers easy comfort. Published in 2020 by Dutton Books for Young Readers and nominated by YALSA, it opens in the immediate aftermath of a sexual assault trial. Em’s brother has been acquitted of raping Em’s friend Margot. The verdict is not a surprise to anyone who follows these cases, but that makes it no less devastating, and McCullough does not soften the blow or rush past it. The wound at the center of this book stays open for every page.

The dual narrative counterpoints Em’s present-day grief and fury with the story of Marguerite de Bressieux, a 15th-century French noblewoman who survived an assault by soldiers, lost everything, and then donned armor and rode out for justice. Em discovers Marguerite’s story while trying to write a research paper she can barely bring herself to care about, and what begins as academic distraction becomes something far more personal. Marguerite’s chapters are written in a heightened, lyrical voice that draws from the conventions of medieval romance and epic poetry, creating a formal counterweight to Em’s raw, contemporary verse.

This is a difficult book. McCullough does not traffic in false resolution. What she offers instead is something rarer: the possibility of surviving the unsurvivable, and the forms that survival can take.

Character Arcs

Em begins the novel in a state of suspended disbelief. The verdict has not yet fully landed. She moves through her days in a kind of controlled dissociation, performing normalcy for her family while her internal world comes apart. McCullough renders this dissociation with precision through verse that is structurally intact on the surface but increasingly fractured in its imagery and logic. Em does not break down. She becomes quieter, more controlled, and more frightening to herself.

Her relationship with her brother Jordan is the book’s most psychologically complex element. Jordan is not a monster in Em’s narrative. He is her brother, the person who taught her to ride a bike, who she has known all her life. McCullough refuses to let Em off the hook of this complexity. Hating what Jordan did does not erase who he is to her. Loving who she thought he was does not excuse what he did. Em has to hold both truths without reconciling them, and the process is genuinely agonizing to witness.

Her friendship with Nor is a quiet source of warmth in an otherwise cold landscape. Nor does not try to fix Em or provide answers. She shows up, sits with her, and asks better questions. This friendship is rendered in short, compressed verse exchanges that carry more emotional weight than many pages of prose would.

Marguerite’s arc moves in the opposite direction: from powerlessness toward agency. Her chapters follow the classical arc of a revenge narrative but complicate it at every turn. The violence she seeks to answer with violence does not leave her clean. Justice, in this book, does not come with catharsis attached. What Marguerite achieves is not peace but something harder to name: a refusal to disappear.

Pacing

McCullough controls pacing through form as much as through plot. The verse structure allows her to slow down time in moments of high emotional intensity, stretching a single feeling across multiple stanzas, and then accelerate through passages where Em’s dissociation flattens experience into list-like brevity. This dynamic is one of the book’s greatest formal achievements. The reader feels the rhythm of trauma: the unbearable slowness of certain moments and the terrifying speed with which others pass.

The dual narrative creates its own rhythmic effect. Each time the book shifts from Em’s present to Marguerite’s past, it creates a kind of breathing room, a step back from the contemporary wound into a historical one that is no less real but carries the slight remove of distance. This pacing decision is wise. A single unbroken narrative of Em’s experience would be nearly unbearable. The alternation between timelines allows the reader to stay present with the material.

The book’s second half accelerates as the two narratives begin to mirror each other more explicitly. Em’s research deepens, and Marguerite’s story moves toward its confrontation. The convergence is handled without melodrama. McCullough does not force the parallel into allegory. The two women remain distinct individuals whose stories rhyme without becoming identical.

Deeper Thematic Exploration

The book’s central thematic question is deceptively simple: what do you do when the system that was supposed to protect you fails? McCullough’s answer is not a rallying cry or a policy argument. It is a study in how individual people survive institutional failure, and what that survival costs.

The legal system’s role in the novel is notable for what it does not do. The trial is essentially over before the book begins. Its outcome is the premise, not the plot. McCullough is not interested in the mechanics of legal justice. She is interested in what happens inside a person after that machine has run its course and produced nothing. This choice keeps the book from becoming a procedural critique and grounds it in lived emotional reality.

Shame and silence are examined with particular care. Both Em and Marguerite navigate the social expectation that victims diminish themselves, apologize for their disruption, and make others comfortable with their pain. Both characters resist this expectation in different ways and at different costs. McCullough traces the internal negotiation between the desire for peace and the refusal to perform it with extraordinary psychological accuracy.

The book also explores the violence of witness. Em did not experience the assault directly. She is a secondary survivor, someone whose life is altered by violence done to someone she loves. McCullough argues implicitly that this kind of harm is real harm, not lesser harm. Em’s grief and anger are not exaggerated or borrowed. They are her own, and they are legitimate.

Faith and meaning-making surface in Marguerite’s chapters. She prays, she doubts, she acts. The spiritual dimension of her story does not resolve into easy theodicy. God, in this novel, is a question that Marguerite poses to the air rather than an answer she receives. This ambiguity feels honest rather than evasive.

Style and Voice

McCullough writes in verse throughout, and the formal decision pays off at every level. Em’s sections use contemporary free verse that reads like thought rather than poetry: fragmented, associative, and raw. The line breaks do real work, often cutting off a sentence at the point where Em’s mind flinches away from what it was about to say.

Marguerite’s sections adopt a more formal register, with longer lines, more regular rhythms, and diction that reaches toward the archaic without becoming inaccessible. This tonal shift is clean and consistent. Young readers who find the elevated register challenging will have enough contextual grounding in the plot to follow the emotional content even when individual phrases require re-reading.

McCullough’s imagery is precise and controlled. She does not reach for easy metaphors. Ashes and fire recur not as symbols that explain the characters’ experiences but as textures that accompany them. The title is earned late in the book, and when it arrives it carries the weight of everything that preceded it.

Verdict

We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire is a formally ambitious, emotionally honest, and genuinely important work of young adult literature. Joy McCullough does not condescend to her readers, does not offer false resolution, and does not flinch from the material her premise demands. The dual narrative structure serves the thematic argument rather than merely decorating it, and the verse throughout does work that prose could not. The 2020 Meridian Award recognized a book that addresses sexual violence and survival with rare literary integrity. Rating: 5.0 out of 5.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this book appropriate for all young adult readers?

The book deals directly with sexual assault and its aftermath. It is not graphic in its depictions, but it does not soften the emotional reality either. Most educators and librarians recommend it for readers 14 and older, and suggest that it works particularly well in facilitated group discussions rather than purely as solo reading.

Do readers need historical background on Marguerite de Bressieux?

No. McCullough provides enough context within the narrative to make Marguerite’s story coherent and compelling without prior knowledge. Readers who want to explore the historical record further will find that Marguerite’s documented history is fragmentary, which gives McCullough room to imagine without distorting.

How does the verse form affect the reading experience for readers who do not typically read poetry?

McCullough’s verse is highly accessible. Em’s sections in particular read more like interior monologue than conventional poetry. Most young adult readers who approach the book expecting prose and encounter verse find themselves adapting within the first few pages. The form quickly comes to feel natural to the subject matter.

Does the book offer hope?

Yes, though not the kind that ties situations into neat resolution. The hope the book offers is specifically the hope of survival and self-authorship: the possibility of continuing to exist, on your own terms, after something has tried to erase you. It is a harder and more durable kind of hope than most fiction provides.

How does this compare to McCullough’s previous novel, Blood Water Paint?

Blood Water Paint also uses verse to explore a historical woman who experienced violence. We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire is structurally more complex, weaving a contemporary narrative alongside the historical one. Readers who loved the first book will find the second more formally ambitious and equally emotionally precise.

Is the brother given any perspective or voice?

Jordan does not receive his own chapters or narrative voice. The book is told entirely from Em’s perspective. McCullough makes a deliberate choice not to center or redeem the person who caused harm. What the reader learns about Jordan comes entirely through Em’s fraught and complicated experience of loving someone she no longer recognizes.

Does the book address the experience of Margot, the assault survivor, directly?

Margot is present as a character but not as a narrator. This is another careful choice. The book is about Em’s experience as a secondary survivor and witness, not about speaking for Margot. Margot has her own interior life, which Em acknowledges she cannot fully access. This restraint is one of the book’s ethical strengths.

What makes this book a useful text for classroom discussion?

The dual narrative structure offers rich comparative analysis. The formal experimentation with verse invites discussion of how form shapes meaning. The book’s refusal to resolve its central tensions makes it genuinely productive for discussion rather than merely illustrative. Educators have found it particularly effective in units addressing media literacy, justice systems, and the literature of witness.