Review: Great fire fighting stories
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 24, 2013
I got a free copy of this book in exchange for this review. I think I actually requested a different book and got this one by mistake - I don't generally read romance, and there's a lot of romance in these six novellas. Some are about single people falling in love, but my favorite was El Bombero, which is about a married couple that is struggling. The male fire fighter wants to work on the front lines, but his wife is terrified by the danger that he's in every time he is called out to a fire. She's resistant to getting counseling, so he ends up moving into a training position where he's miserable. How they get back together is the best romance in these novellas, at least for this non-romance reader.The main appeal of these novellas for me was the information on fire fighting techniques and training. Shay's research really shines whenever the crews go out on a call.Just a couple quibbles. First, there is some jargon used in the book without any explanation. For instance, she refers to several types of truck without defining them. Finally, in the last novella, she tells us what a "quint" is. Yes, I could have gotten out of bed and looked it up on Wikipedia, but I didn't want to. I wanted to stay comfy and keep reading the story. If she defined quint in novella 6, why not the first time she used the term? Second, I felt that the identity of the arsonist as well as the leak in the department (threads that tie all 6 novellas together) were fairly obvious very early on. Yes, she threw in a red herring, which as it turns out was more pink than red, but it was still predictable. I prefer a story where the mystery is more difficult to figure out, even when all the clues are right in front of you.If you're a fan of romance, you'll love this book. If you're not, you may learn some things from this book, but be aware that it's quite heavy on the romance.