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tildahlia's review
3.0
This book gets a lot of rave reviews and frankly, I'm not sure I get it. For one, it didn't have nearly enough sex in it for a book centred on an affair (that's the best bit!!). But also I think it's pretty impossible to have correspondence between lovers in this situation not be completely twee and cringeworthy to read to anyone else but the people involved (it made me think of the Jonathan Safran Foer/Natalie Portman correspondence which was just the height of pretension). I liked the portrayal of the complexity of the marriage but genuinely got no sense of why she was in love with affair guy - what was it about him...really? This made it hard for me to get into generally. The writing was ok but I wished for more.
alisonlaw's review
Listen to my interview with [a:Jamie Quatro|6426025|Jamie Quatro|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1511301159p2/6426025.jpg] in Episode 26 of the Literary Atlanta podcast, released February 8, 2018.
kimanguish's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
"What if you're wrong? What if, for all these years, 'God' has been just a beautiful, and terrifying, fairy tale? What if theology is, after all, just poetry?"
more about god than infidelity. beautiful writing.
chillcox15's review
5.0
Reduced to a short summary, Fire Sermon would sound like any number of books that came before it: a good woman in an essentially decent if not perfect marriage risks it all by having an affair. At times, Quatro's plotting risks falling into the cliché of that rudimentary description, but her invigorating construction, incisive detail work, and intense evocation of longing and lust turn Fire Sermon into one of the more emotional and erotic books I've read in a while.
djeanine's review
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
tensy's review
3.0
A haunting, and sometimes frustrating, account of a married couple told from the point of view of the wife, Maggie, an academic writer and homemaker, who marries young and then struggles with how to rationalize repeated affairs with her view of God and theology. This short novel packed a big punch in some sections, but then lost me in others.
brb_reads's review
4.0
I really enjoyed the writing style in this book. Would like to discuss with someone else who has read this.
ritualaunt's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
balletbookworm's review
5.0
If you like your protagonists deeply flawed with conflicting motivations, get yourself a copy of Fire Sermon. A deep meditation on temptation, marriage, and partnership told in a non-linear fashion. One of those books that is very quiet but manages to bowl you over with its sentences.
pearloz's review
3.0
Short, well written novel basically about a woman's affair and its spiritual aftermath. Her indecisiveness and confusion ran the length of this book, and was often painful to bear: am I in love with this poet? Do I love my husband? Of course I do. Should I leave him? Maybe, but how do I leave a guy who's really nice to me? He wants sex, I don't, I'll let him have sex...I shouldn't have let him have sex--maybe the performance of sex when I don't want it is love? But my affair was the best thing to ever happen to me. Felt like I was reading this lady's diary.
It often felt like an evangelical version of a Woody Allen drama--complete with visits to a "therapist" (is that right?).
The husband was basically a caricature, and he was rendered as a sad, pathetic man for much of it--the dildos and vibrators felt like desperate attempts to reignite a marriage on the verge of bed death. I felt bad for him. I knew he suspected but he came across as kind of clueless when she said she never even touched the poet.
I think...I mean, I think it worked out for them. It seemed like a happy ending, no?
It often felt like an evangelical version of a Woody Allen drama--complete with visits to a "therapist" (is that right?).
The husband was basically a caricature, and he was rendered as a sad, pathetic man for much of it--the dildos and vibrators felt like desperate attempts to reignite a marriage on the verge of bed death. I felt bad for him. I knew he suspected but he came across as kind of clueless when she said she never even touched the poet.
I think...I mean, I think it worked out for them. It seemed like a happy ending, no?