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There are currently 41 member reviews
for A Fireproof Home for the Bride
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Angela J. (Highlands Ranch, CO)
A Fireproof Home for the Bride
I too felt this book was slow going at the beginning. While Amy Scheibe is a promising author; I thought the main character wasn't truly fleshed out. It took a great leap of imagination to accept that such a sheltered & naïve girl with no college experience could become a reporter. I also felt the author had a checklist in her mind: date rape, check, immigration, check, racism, check. I was surprised she didn't have a gay character, and maybe a developmental disabled person to complete the list. I don't think I would recommend this book to anyone.
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Laura P. (Atlanta, GA)
A Fireprrof Home for the Bride
Amy Scheibe's tale of racial and ethnic discrimination in the upper Midwest of the 1950s is a great read for the last 100 pages - but the first 267 are a slog, poorly paced with wooden characters and little plot direction. Is it a coming of age story? A love story? A murder mystery? Hard to tell -and since the author sets up all of these possibilities, the direction of the story is unclear and the plot has little sense of dramatic tension. Scheibe finally decides which story she wants to emphasize and the book ends well, but had I not been reading this to review it, I would never have read that far.
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Teresa R. (Evansville, IN)
Slow to begin
I thought this book was off to a very slow start... Took over 100 pages for mr to become interested. Writing was good, but I felt the story developed very, very slowly. Could have been the time of year, but I truly felt it was a very slow read.
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Leslie G. (Peabody, MA)
Interesting but Flawed
As someone who was a child in the fifties, I found the references to the music and styles of the times brought back memories of my early years. However, while aspects of the novel were engaging, I felt the character of Emmy was problematic. It was hard to believe she had the personality to draw people to be so interested in her. Even though some aspects of the book were described in almost too much detail, description explaining Emmy's charisma was scant. For example, would a teenager with only a high school education and no journalistic background be so readily invited by an experienced newspaperman to be his cub reporter as Jim asked Emmy to be?
Over-drawn figures of speech were much too frequent. At one point Jim warns Emmy about clichés. He tells her "to beat them out" of her writing. Scheibe would do well to heed the advice of her character's mouth piece and try to strip away some of the "purple prose" in her book. It serves to distract the reader from the content.
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Barb (Mount Joy, PA)
Started great then fell apart for me
The plot & characters engaged me at the start of the book. The issues described and the picture of that time were well handled at the start. However as the book progressed, the writing started to wear on me. The similes and use of adjectives were distracting me from the story and characters. By the end of the book I felt there were too many coincidences driving the plot and that things were resolved too neatly. It would make a good book discussion to see others' reactions to the author's writing style and plot resolution.
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Rita H. (Centennial, CO)
Promises not Fulfilled
I believe this may be a first novel so I do not want to be too critical but several things bothered me right from the beginning. The first problem I had was that Emmy called her parents by their first names. I do not believe this would have happened in a Minnesota Lutheran community in this time period, especially in a family which was so strict. Throughout the book, I was bothered by things that either did not seem to ring true or that did not have enough foundation laid to make them believable. I appreciated the concept of the book, comparing opposition to Mexican immigrants to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. But, I never quite understood the violence against women by Davidson and Ambrose did not ring true as a character for me. Bottom line, I was disappointed by this book.
