New Book Review: A Firefighter's Grace

Title: A Firefighter's Grace 

Author: Lizzie C. Frank

Date: 2023

Quote: "I may look like an ordinary firefighter, with my chocolate-brown hair and even browner beard, but there is more to me than meets the eye."

Whew. I did enjoy this sweet Christian romance, in a way, and I would like to encourage the writer...but. That. The questions chocolate-haired Alex and his sad but faithful sweetheart Grace raise in my mind are many. Are they intentional self-parodies? Are they drawn from real people--the sort of shy, emotionally damaged young people who seek solace (a word repeated throughout their story) in conformity and try to live their lives in, and as, cliches, as much as possible? 

It's not easy (for me at least) to like Alex, who also wears a necklace. Grace at least manages to use cliches about needing God's help to trust (transitive verb without its object) again to cover up her obvious, and preposterous, vulnerability to Alex's self-conscious sex appeal, but these characters, apart and together, still seem like The Cliche Kids. Their pastor speaks in trite, general phrases too, and so do Grace's parents. Alex's parents are dead; although Cliche Guy blames God for not helping him to save them we never find out exactly what happened to them.

It's a sweet romance; the genre doesn't leave much room for realism. Still, a little more realism might have made it easier to suspend disbelief in this story. We've seen that Grace spent some time in the burn unit at the hospital, so there may really be an element of "selfless" courage about her singing at a fundraiser for survivors of another forest fire, but supporting details like recovery time or even the words "smoke inhalation" aren't in the book. This story seems to be told through the blur of generalization Sunday School "peer counsellors" are trained to use to prevent emotional reactions to what people tell them. Neither romantic love nor good fiction can live on those generalizations. Love is particular.

Worse than that is the list of the author's other publications. Other Booktober Blitz writers have told their readers that Amazon's marketing model demands a number of titles that many writers find hard to sustain. That explains why a writer who can do better might crank out a few titles, especially for the shorter gveaway books, drawn from generalized "peer counselling scenarios" alone...but such an approach to writing is unlikely to compete successfully against the corpora of writers who've actually spent a few years writing a collection of long, short, and serialized fiction before they started publishing it on Amazon. 

Can A Firefighter's Grace be enjoyed? Yes, if it's read with a sense of empathy for people who really do protect their emotional selves by telling their own stories in cliches. On that view Alex and Grace are pathetic, troubled souls trapped in young, attractive bodies, probably like some couple the reader knows, who elicit sympathy and good wishes. Romance novels' redeeming social value is as marital aids. For women who like to identify with 22-year-old brides while feeling good about their more mature relationships, this story could work.

Can Lizzie C. Frank do better than this? Yes. She clearly knows how to put words together. She clearly wants and intends to write wholesome stories about people whose religious faith is part of their lives. Adding a little time, thought, and research to the writing process is all that stands between this Booktober Blitz author and writing good fiction. Do young men whom young women like say things like the sentence quoted from page one? What do they say? How can readers be shown that women appreciate Alex's chocolate-brown hair without getting the impression that Alex is unbearably vain? If first person, present tense, is the only way to tell the story, would letting Alex focus on what he's doing, rather than himself and his story, bring readers close to him without turning them against him?