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Book Summary and Reviews of A Fireproof Home for the Bride by Amy Scheibe

A Fireproof Home for the Bride by Amy Scheibe

A Fireproof Home for the Bride

by Amy Scheibe

  • Critics' Consensus (0):
  • Readers' Rating (43):
  • Published:
  • Mar 2015, 384 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Emmaline Nelson and her sister Birdie grow up in the hard, cold rural Lutheran world of strict parents, strict milking times, and strict morals. Marriage is preordained, the groom practically predestined. Though it's 1958, southern Minnesota did not see changing roles for women on the horizon. Caught in a time bubble between a world war and the ferment of the 1960s, Emmy doesn't see that she has any say in her life, any choices at all. Only when Emmy's fiancé shows his true colors and forces himself on her does she find the courage to act - falling instead for a forbidden Catholic boy, a boy whose family seems warm and encouraging after the severe Nelson farm life.

Not only moving to town and breaking free from her engagement but getting a job on the local newspaper begins to open Emmy's eyes. She discovers that the KKK is not only active in the Midwest but that her family is involved, and her sense of the firm rules she grew up under - and their effect - changes completely.

A Fireproof Home for the Bride has the charm of detail that will drop readers into its time and place: the home economics class lecture on cuts of meat, the group date to the diner, the small-town movie theater popcorn for a penny. It also has a love story - the wrong love giving way to the right - and most of all the pull of a great main character whose self-discovery sweeps the plot forward. The setting is Kent Haruf, but the heroine is pure Annie Proulx.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Scheibe's multilayered plot feels organic: the strands are knitted into a tight story of substance that touches on the politics of race, class, and gender without coming off as too preachy. There are a few small flaws: Emmy, for instance, seems awfully progressive for someone who has known nothing but her dour, religious family, and influential bestie Bev abruptly drops out of the story, but overall, the book is spectacular." - Publishers Weekly

"The narrative drags somewhat in the middle, but the action picks up again as Emmy hurtles through wintry obstacles (without her boots) toward an ending that is as neat as a well-darned sock." - Library Journal

"A good coming-of-age story lies buried underneath a ridiculously overdetermined and didactic plot." - Kirkus

This information about A Fireproof Home for the Bride was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Amy Scheibe

Amy Scheibe is also the author of What Do You Do All Day? and a former editor at a New York City publishing house. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children.

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