It's fair to say Kambri Crews had an unconventional childhood. Her parents (and maternal grandparents, and several other relatives) were deaf, so she took on a translator's duties from a young age. If that weren't enough, when she was seven, her family picked up and moved to a rural patch of woods in Boars Head, Texas, where their first order of business was to burn the undergrowth, clearing out the snakes. As her parents struggled to make ends meet, she ran wild, with little supervision. On top of everything else, there's her parents' dysfunctional relationship, which escalated so dramatically that when Kambri was a teen, her father tried to kill her mother.
This sounds very bleak, but Burn Down the Ground is no simple misery memoir. For one thing, Crews is very funny. (She runs a comedy-focused PR firm, and she's often performed as a comic storyteller.) She isn't entirely making light, though: she doesn't flinch from describing her father's violent attack on her mother, and she doesn't softball how the turmoil shaped her youth. (One of the book's most excruciating passages comes when she helps vandalize a childhood friend's abandoned home.) Ultimately, what makes this a moving, compelling memoir is that Crews hasn't limited herself to a single theme--whether it's deafness, life in the woods, domestic violence or having a parent in prison. Instead, she's drawn upon all of them and produced a nuanced, self-aware account that does justice to her complicated childhood. --Kelly Faircloth, freelance writer