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Loading... The Fireman: A Novel (edition 2016)by Joe Hill (Author)
Work InformationThe Fireman by Joe Hill
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I can’t think of any way to review this without spoilers, so even though this will be a very brief review, I’m spoiler tagging this entire post. It’s also probably not very coherent, but here it is: The Fireman offers an interesting take on the dystopian post-apocalyptic story. We see what happens when a society is so enamored with a charismatic leader that they surrender their individual liberties for the promise of safety. We see peer-pressure for conformity and intolerance for dissenting opinions carried to its inevitable conclusion. We look at the mechanics of a developing mob mentality, understanding why and how a group of individuals surrenders themselves to the pleasure of becoming one with the group. How those ordinary people can be so secure in their righteousness that the end justifies the means, and how those means may start with small breaks in our moral code but may grow to terrible atrocities. Unfortunately, the actual vehicle that carries these ideas is problematic. I found the romance awkward and implausible. The attempt to provide a semi-scientific explanation for the disease fell flat for me as it seemed contradictory to actual events in the story. There were also enormous plot holes and other contradictory events. I found it wholly implausible that a school nurse (disclosure: I’m an RN with 2 decades of experience) would have the knowledge and skills to provide the sort of field medicine that our heroine routinely engaged in. And finally, I found it wholly implausible that a group of intelligent and resourceful individuals would be so stupid as to take the “Martha Quinn Island” story at face value. In this day and age, only fools and the cognitively impaired would unreservedly believe something they found on the internet. Audiobook version. Kate Mulgrew's performance was excellent. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesKaranlık Kitaplık (10) AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Horror.
Literature.
Thriller.
HTML: From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman. The fireman is coming. Stay cool. No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it's Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodiesâ??before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe. Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she's discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob's dismay, Harper wants to liveâ??at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child. Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squadsâ??armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn't as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter's jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged. In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman's secrets before her lifeâ??and that of her unborn childâ??goes up No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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The characters fell flat, too. The heroes were heroic, the bad guys extra bad, all without the shades of grey that make up human complexity. I really wanted more nuanced personalities to engage with.
Kate Mulgrew's narration of the audiobook was the highlight of my experience with this book. Her voice is dynamic, engaging, and captivating.
Overall, this story had all the ingredients to cause an inferno, but only ended up smoldering lightly. ( )