by Nora Roberts
GP Putnam Sons (Penguin) 2011

First sentence:
Caught in the crosshairs of wind above the Bitterroots, the jump ship fought to find its stream.

Worst sentence: Nerves. She could all but feel them riding along his skin.
Biggest surprise: not coming down with terminal leukemia while reading this

Let’s get a few things straight:
1. I have never read a romance novel.
2. I’m not sure why, because this was not shitty.
3. “Chasing Fire” is a double-entendre, for firefighters on one hand, and ill-advised unprotected coworker sex on the other. Unexpected pregnancy and HPV may result, but I only read three pages so I don’t know for sure.

I knew Nora Roberts was a supermarket paperback writer, but I did not know she was a romance author when I picked this off the shelf. It purported to be about firejumpers (firefighters who parachute into wildfires), but it was only from doing a little research that I discovered this is supposed to be a romance.

This is not a literary work, it’s a soap opera, but I’ll be damned to call it shitty. Believe me I’m as shocked as you. Nora Roberts has 209 novels to her name (wait…..210……211), and being a romance writer, and with a name in such a pointy font, she is clearly marketed entirely to women. Yet I turned to page four without hesitation. I expected it to be hacky and overdone, but with only a few exceptions, it appears to be good storytelling, about a small-town firejumping girl in love with a boyish firejumping guy. The dialogue is believable and the characters presumably have very good bodies. I’d read that.

Other reviewers: Rosario’s Reading Journal, Errant Dreams Reviews, RT Book Reviews, Smexy Books, All About Romance

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