The Fireman's Wife

This is a quick, great summer read. The author draws you in immediately and the storyline moves right along. The lack of communication between Cassie and Peck is a little frustrating but overall the characters are realistic. As a lifelong resident of South Carolina (a few years younger than the main characters), I found the geographical setting as well as the community relationships exactly as I remember in the mid to late 60's.

I'm not going to rehash the story yet again. This isn't the type of book that I normally read though I do read a wide variety. Jack is a friend of a friend that recommended it to me. I was very surprised that I enjoyed it very much. It sucked me in. I liked the characters and thought they were quite realistic and had believable flaws. The story was good and moved along in spite of not having an explosion or murder or some such every other page. It really drew out the emotions. I'm in for the next book by Jack.

Cassie Johnson has been married for 15 years to Peck Johnson. After discovering she was pregnant at the end of her summer romance with Peck, Cassie is forced to give up her dreams of attending college, is disowned and cut off from her preacher father and her beloved mountain home, and she is left with little choice but to marry Peck and move to his home in the low country. Their marriage has been rocky and Cassie has never been able to get over the loss of her dreams or the fact that her father never let her back into his life and died without knowing his grandchild. The book is set in the summer of 1970. Cassie is about to go to the mountains to spend time with her mother as she always does. However, this time she is unsure if she is coming back. Peck, the new fire chief of the Garden City Beach Fire Department, can't really take the time off work to chase her. The area is in the midst of a drought and fires are threatening the area. Besides, Peck knows he loves Cassie and that he needs to give her the time to figure things out. The Fireman's Wife is a beautiful story that is about shades of gray. It's about hearing both sides of the story and being able to understand both points of view. Both Cassie and Peck are sympathethic characters so I didn't really end up taking sides. Cassie has mourned all of her losses for fifteen years and has never truly engaged in her life with Peck. Peck loves his wife and daughter tremendously. He just doesn't know how to give Cassie whatever is missing from her life and feels he needs to let her go to figure it out. The descriptions of the both of the landscapes in this story are beautiful. Whether describing Cassie's beautiful and lush mountain home or Peck's dry and drought-stricken low country marsh, the word pictures are vivid. I loved this book. I thought it was poignant and gripping. In fact, I would have devoured it if I would've had the free time. I would highly recommend this story to anyone who loves reading about relationships. Just make sure you have your tissues handy.

This is a book about choices and regrets. It's about not leaving things unsaid. I didn't realize how much I was into this book until about 3/4 of the way through, when the really dramatic thing happens (I'm definitely not going to give it away here). At that point, I realized that I really had developed a connection to the characters, to the point that I was almost in tears reading about their pain.

The Fireman's Wife tells the story of a troubled marriage in chapters that alternate between the first-person narratives of a husband (Peck) and a wife (Cassie). True to his southern fiction roots, Riggs's real strength in this book is his evocative descriptions of the two distinct landscapes that feature in this story, the mountains and the low country of South Carolina. These landscapes play a critical role in the plot and help to form the identities of the primary characters. In many places, the characters seem like personifications of the land. In this excerpt, Cassie describes the low country where she and Peck live: "Here along the salt creeks and beaches, the sun demands that you disrobe to nothing, sink knee-deep into black mud, dig out oysters, or empty crab pots. Seining nets are like bridal veils thrown into creeks capturing shrimp and minnows, their transparent bodies nearly invisible in the turbid muck. It is all part of the land's requirement that you become a living part of the rivers and creeks." Cassie's and Peck's voices are simple and honest. These characters talk like real people. The effect is mostly pure and unpretentious but, occasionally, the casual dialog becomes tedious in its banality. Also, because there's very little distinction between the voices of Cassie and Peck, the shifting point-of-view structure of the book has little effect. The plot--including a rocky marriage, a troubled teenager, and a real estate dispute--feels clumsy but is mostly redeemed by the sweeping landscapes in which it unfolds.