Things You Save in a Fire turned out to not be the book that I thought it was going to be, not that this is bad thing. I thought it would be a more serious family drama, along the lines of anything by Jonathan Franzen or even Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, but Things You Save in a Fire leans more towards rom com, so it is the perfect read if you are looking for something light and enjoyable that you could take with you to the beach.

Things You Save in a Fire is about a twenty-something firefighter named Cassie Hanwell who is great at her job, very level-headed and the one you want around in case of an emergency. The novel opens on her about to accept the Austin Fire Department valor award, when she realizes the guy who is going to present the award to her is someone she knows from high school who did a very bad thing to her on the night of her 16^th birthday. The reader does not find out until nearly the end of the novel what exactly it was that he did to her, but it is very easy to guess what it was, and to understand how it has traumatized her and how it informs her later relationships (or lack thereof) with other men. It also happened on the same day that her mother decided to abandon Cassie and her father and move to Massachusetts to be with another man.

When Cassie goes on stage to accept her award, the creep has the audacity to squeeze her ass while posing for a photograph, and Cassie (very understandably) beats the crap out of him with the award. This of course has repercussions for her, but not for him; Cassie must either apologize to him or she will lose her job. She refuses to apologize and instead convinces her boss to transfer her to a fire station in a town near Boston, Massachusetts because her mother has, fortuitously, asked her to move to Massachusetts for a year to help her out as she is having issues with her eyes.

Cassie is not completely estranged from her mother, but she has not forgiven her mother for abandoning her. She does not really want to move to Massachusetts to help her mother out, but she does not want to lose her job either, especially since she was on her way to being promoted to a lieutenant, so she figures it is better to start over at another fire station if she cannot keep her job in Austin. Before she leaves Austin, her boss (who happens to be an older Black woman) has a serious discussion with her about how to handle things at the new station, because it sounds like Cassie’s new boss is not thrilled about having a female firefighter on his team. Essentially Cassie must do everything possible to not remind her crew that is a woman: no makeup, cut her hair short or wear it up, and do not draw attention to her boobs. She is also, under no circumstances, to fall in love with another firefighter.

Since this is a rom com, you get one guess what happens to Cassie on the first day of her new job in Massachusetts. Yep, she falls head over heels for the other new firefighter, a smokin’ hot man who is absolutely perfect in every way. And let the rom com antics ensue. I know I sound like I am taking the piss out of rom coms, but I am not. They are a nice escape from reality, especially when you are having a rough time, but they are just too predictable.

I would not say that Things You Save in a Fire is a very profound novel, though. Cassie’s new crew is full of old men with old-fashioned sexist views on women, but they are not aggressively misogynistic towards her. They treat her with kid gloves, so she must prove to them that she is strong and capable of doing her job, and they quickly learn to respect and appreciate her. She does end up with an anonymous stalker who attempts to threaten her into quitting her job, but when she confronts her crew about it, they seem horrified that she is being threatened.

Many other dramatic things happen in the novel which I will not get into (too many dramatic things, which made it difficult for me to take this novel too seriously), but you can expect Cassie to learn how to confront her past traumas instead of continuing to internalize them, and you can expect the novel to have a satisfying ending.