Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss anti-Black racism and racist violence.

At its core, Ain’t Burned All the Bright is a book about the narrator’s, and by extension his family’s, inability to breathe due to the overwhelming nature of everything that is going on in the world. His struggle to breathe is both literal and figurative. On a literal level, his father is dealing with COVID-19, an infection that targets the respiratory system and can lead to death in severe cases; the words “I can’t breathe” became a slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd uttered them as his dying breath while being choked by a police officer; and lastly, the continuing effects of climate change mean things like smog warnings and wildfires are increasingly common, rendering the air more difficult to breathe. On a figurative level, the narrator’s difficulty to breathe comes from the anxiety he feels from the aforementioned crises—he is completely overwhelmed and throughout the book, tries to process the traumatic experience of being stuck in lockdown while danger looms all around him.

Each of the narrator’s family members has their own way of coping with these feelings as well: the