With the Fire on High
Elizabeth Acevedo

A love letter to the single mom, good food, and community, Elizabeth Acevedo tells the coming-of-age story of Emoni Santiago in With the Fire on High, her follow-up novel to her award-winning debut, Poet X.
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Emoni is a single mom finishing high school with a two-year- old. While her classmates are charting their post-graduation futures, Emoni finds herself trying to determine if her heart’s desire—and natural talent—to cook can be turned into something more for her and her daughter. But before she can let herself dream of being a chef, she must work through the dynamics of her relationship with her daughter’s father, her own father, and a new high school student who has caught her attention.

At the center of it all is the food. Emoni cooks traditional dishes with a personal twist, using “magic” as a special ingredient that plunges her diners into vivid memories and evokes unexpected emotions upon each bite. These magical moments lovingly recall readers back to Laura Esquival’s Como Agua Para Chocolate, and it is only part of what makes this book special.

While this novel touches on a little bit of everything—her Afro-Puerto Rican identity, the Latinx community, loss of parents, growing up, love, and limitations—it is the rarely heard voice of the teen mother that makes this book a triumph.
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Acevedo reminds us that motherhood changes our circumstances but it does not change our desires. With the Fire on High honors the challenges of young motherhood and throws the stereotypes of the inner-city teen mom to the fire.

Elizabeth Acevedo is the author of The Poet X, which won the 2018 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and was a Kirkus Award finalist. She is a National Poetry Slam champion and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo lives with her partner in Washington, DC. You can find out more about her at www.acevedowrites.com.

With the Fire on High is publication by Harper Teen. Click here to purchase.
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Reviewed by
Harmony Trevino​
​5/3/2019

Harmony Trevino is a writer and voracious reader of books. She started her education in journalism, and ventured into nonprofit communications. Harmony eventually went to work at TOMS Shoes for five years supporting their philanthropy efforts. She currently resides in Tennessee.

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