Melissa "Dog/Wolf Lover" Martin's Reading & Ramblings: The Fireman by Joe Hill

Saturday, July 2, 2016

The Fireman by Joe Hill

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 bodies—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 live—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 Squads—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 life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke. @goodreads

MY REVIEW:

4 STARS

...THE FIREMAN IS COMING.

I gave the book 4 stars because there is a part that lagged for me, but it's still awesome!

I'm assuming everyone knows there is a disease going around and if you catch the spore your skin becomes dragonscale. And then later on you burst into flame! Yay! NOT!

One of the main characters in the book is Harper and she is a very nice nurse. She sings to kids and people at the hospital and she's just a very nice person. She has an arse of a husband named Jakob and I loathed him. I was hoping someone would just set him on fire!

The Fireman himself doesn't make too many appearances in the book, but when he does he's always helping someone and bringing them back to the camp. Which turned into some kind of psycho cult place after the leader was sick. The Fireman stayed away from the camp until he was needed and there are reasons that he didn't come help when things went bad. I won't tell you, spoilers and all.

The people at the came have found a way to control burning in a blaze of glory. It's called the Bright and you need to read the book to learn more about that as well. I think it is totally cool. BUT, there is something else they can do, well some of them can do that is really cool. There are certain benefits of having the disease and I would like to be on the winning side!

There are a lot of characters in the book that I really loved and some I didn't of course. I loved little Nick, he's a deaf boy at the camp who becomes close friends with Harper. Renee, The Fireman, Allie, some really cool peeps. At one point though someone is stealing special things from each person. I was really mad when I found out the story behind that issue.

Overall, the book is really good and I'm glad it's part of my collection :-)