Review: Fire Season by KD Casey

Fire Season by K.D. Casey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a hard book to review, because its strength is not the story itself, really. It's a simple story and most of it is about the day-to-day of two professional baseball players, Charlie the star pitcher, and Reid the down-to-his-luck relief pitcher that's just been traded. Both are dealing with their own stuff when the book starts: Charlie is recently divorced and Reid is a recovering alcoholic who's not sure about his future in the league. The main strengths of Fire Season, and what differentiates it from the other hundreds of sports romances, are the slow pace, the deep exploration of both characters and the evocative writing. Basically, what we could call the vibes.

The tone of Fire Season is unequivocally melancholic and reflective, without being melodramatic or (the worst crime of all), boring. Not much really happens: I wouldn't call it a slow-burn, but it does have the feel of what I've seen people call a "domestic slow-burn". There are a lot of small moments that made me swoon, and a lot of beautifully written passages that made me pause.

When the writing was focusing on romance and on small details, it was evocative and flowed well. On the other hand though, I found that the story suffered when it had to focus on bigger, concrete plot elements. I really felt like the author failed to convey the urgency of the forest fires, for example. Friends had to explain to me the danger associated with an evacuation order so I could really understand Christine's situation, because all of the characters were basically acting like she was refinishing her hardwood floors and needed to be out of the house for a few days or something. The scene when Charlie finds Christine packing up the house doesn't even explain why she's doing it at first!

“Are you, uh, selling the house?” Charlie asks.
“It’s your property, so that’d be difficult.” She shakes a long strand of hair where it’s fallen in her face. “You’re probably not up on all the evacuation notices. Things are worse this year.”
“If you need a place to stay, guest room’s yours,” he says.
Then the next thing Charlie says is Well, cool story, anyways, I was just here to pick up my dog! Bye! There are a lot of little moments like this one, or dialogue that jumps from one subject to another, that made me wonder: Wait, what just happened? Which dog did he end up adopting, the one he just spent 5 pages with, or this random one that was mentioned once in the chapter? What's wrong with margarine? Etc. Mostly things that should have been caught in editing and weren't, IMO.

I thought I didn't know much about baseball, but turns out I was able to keep up with most of the sport details pretty well. I still feel like context clues should do the trick for most readers, but YMMV. I haven't read the previous book and everything worked out fine. But I might check it out now!

I received a free copy of this book and am providing my honest review voluntarily.


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