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?

New Book Review: Rekindled Hearts

Title: Rekindled Hearts 

Buy it on Bookshop

Author: Mary Asher

Date: 2021

Publisher: Mary Asher

Quote: "But now the one for her was gone."

Joanne doesn't have that mythical "biological clock" telling her she must get married before she's thirty-five. She has parents who, though apparently Christian, tell her little else but that. Joanne was widowed before the wedding and doesn't want to fall in love again. Joanne stays in New York City and avoids her family as much as possible.

Her best friend's older brother, Rick, was engaged to a woman who seemed more and more wrong for him until they broke up. Rick got a job--no, two jobs--in their old home town, and became a local celebrity. Women throw themselves at him in a demented, desperate way that I don't believe happens, even in the Northern States, in countries with a strong tradition of the man doing the asking.

That's not the only indication that this story has been transplanted from some other part of the world, where it might actually have happened. With a little prodding from Sarah, Rick and Joanne agree to try fake-dating for just one Christmas break. That could happen in the United States. Promenading around the town together, they meet some older women and greet them politely as "Aunties." That could happen in the United States, too, but it would take some explanation about how the little group of baby-free women had formed some sort of social club or micro-enterprise and named themselves "The Aunties," the way this web site's screen name for biological and adoptive nieces, nephews, cousins, and friends is "The Nephews." If it's not some sort of trademark or at least a familiar joke, calling people who are not your aunt (or other relative) "Auntie" (or some other kinship term) can be heard as rude in the US. But it's normal, and polite, in some places. 

I noticed that, and then some of the things the characters say aren't what people in the US or UK would be likely to say, either...and I want to know where this story really comes from.

But it's a delightful story. What else is in it, besides the predictable sweet romance and the awful, pushy parents, is the couple's spirituality, shaped by their different personalities. Rick tends to be overconfident and talks before he thinks. (I would not want him for myself.) Joanne, we learn, tends to be underconfident, unambitious about her job--it's not a big, rich company and she never even thinks about what the company does, exactly, except that it's going down--or about finding a better one, afraid that letting herself appreciate Rick might mean she'd only lose him. They can surmount these personal shortcomings only through prayer, during which they receive insights they credit to God.

Well...I'll say this. I've known Christians who believe that if you don't ask for such insights, and get them, you're not really a Christian. I've known Christians who believe that it's presumptuous to ask and probably a symptom of brain damage if you ever do receive a "voice" or "message" or "vision." I've spent most time around Christians who believe that it's appropriate to ask for guidance, but that guidance from God is most likely to come in the form of a Bible passage dominating our attention (I've known people who managed to go wrong even with that, too). I have asked. I have received guidance, sometimes as words, occasionally as visual impressions, often as Bible passages. Whether God or the angels or the devils concern themselves with such "messages," or whether they come from a "Higher" or "Deeper" Self, is more than I can claim to know. 

I know this much--if we believe that an Infinite God created us for God's purposes, then it is illogical to doubt that God can give guidance to individual creatures. The question is whether God chooses to do that. An Infinite Creator is not a bored bureaucrat. God is as likely to pay attention to our concerns as those of us who write are to pay attention to our characters' concerns, except that God has all of Eternity to pay attention to whatever God chooses. It is logically less likely, not more likely, that God would ever say (as we writers must) "Right--that's enough about A--now let's get on to B." 

If you would like to read a fact-based fiction describing what it's like to pray for guidance, here is one. I recommend it for that reason. A romance is a romance, and the only characters who are developed at all, Rick's and Joanne's immediate families, are pushy enough to be read as Bad Examples...but Rick's and Joanne's spirituality is real.