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Les

Les

Flash Fire - Caroline B. Cooney Basic premise was good, how would kids handle escaping a forest fire without any adults around to help them? The problem was that all the characters, particularly the parents, were like caricatures. No one was normal, everyone was just so over-the top: the tofu-eating tree huggers; the harpy mom browbeating her plain daughter to be more glamorous because she's impacting mom's status with the country club mothers; the brooding dad who his son can never please; the narcissist mom who works out for hours each day to keep herself beautiful but won't interact with her kids; the socialite pissed at her son because he became a fireman instead of heading to Wall Street, etc.

The kids were pretty much stereotypes as well, the only unique one being a mentally challenged Romanean boy that a family adopted then dumped off on sitters when they got tired of playing parents. The one thing all the kids had in common was that their parents were total nut jobs. They're all on their own when a forest fire flames up into their isolated canyon. Did have some good fire safety advice and portrayed the difficulty of firefighting in isolated locations.