TW:

Sexual assault (not graphic, mostly alluded to); fat-phobic comments)

I am so bummed about this book. I have had such good luck with Book of the Month books for the most part, and this one sounded amazing. Cassie, the protagonist, is a female firefighter, a relatively rare occurrence and something I was really intrigued by. I don't think I've ever read another book with a firefighter as a main character. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to the potential I felt like it had in the beginning.

First of all, Cassie is really hard to root for. Along with being a firefighter, she is also a paramedic, and she loves her job. She's also very good at her job, something that we are told and shown over and over (and over and over) again. Everything that Cassie does, she excels at. Pullups? She can do 20, which is, according to Cassie, "a lot, even for a guy." Basketball? She can out-shoot any man on the court. Keeping calm in a crisis? She keeps her head even when grown men collapse weeping at her feet(okay, that last part is a little exaggerated, but not by much). The point is, she's perfect at everything. Everything...except being a girl! She's just not into hair and fashion and makeup and all those "girly" things. Need someone to jump into burning room full of orphans and save every last one? Cassie's your girl. Just don't ask her to toast you a bagel, because she's such a terrible cook! Get it, everybody? We're subverting gender stereotypes here!!
In reality, all this accomplishes is to induce a lot of eye rolling from me. She's not just good at her job. She's better than every other person (man) she works with, even the ones who have been doing it for decades longer than her. She's got the not-like-other-girls thing down pat. All the way down to some 'real love doesn't exist' nonsense that she insists upon throughout most of the book.
There's an obligatory makeover scene that Cassie insists is not actually a makeover scene:

It's important to note that this was not a makeover moment like some teen movie where the homely girl becomes a swan. I wasn't homely before this moment, and I wouldn't be homely later, when I clamped myself back into my oxen-harness sports bra and Dickies utility pants. This wasn't a better version of me I was seeing the the mirror--just a different one. It was like I was meeting an unknown part of myself for the first time. The flouncy part.

So she tells us it's NOT like a scene from a teen movie, but then she is completely unrecognizable later on to people who met her all dressed up. It's just so tropey and juvenile.

The romance had some cute moments, but it suffered from so many ridiculous tropes and contrivances that I just didn't connect with them. First of all, this book is one big pile of insta-love. They see each other, they fall for each other. Then there is the contrivance that keeps them from dating and her pretty much ignoring him for the majority of the book. They both work as firefighters, you see, and it is Against The Rules for them to date. Not an actual, written rule or part of their contracts or anything. It's just some unspoken rule that exists to keep these two apart for...reasons? I just didn't feel the connection between them, and didn't understand why they liked each other beyond the love-at-first-sight.

I also wanted more from her relationship with her mother. When her mother reaches out to her and asks her to come help her through an illness, Cassie begrudgingly agrees, and only because she is on the verge of losing her job if she doesn't relocate. She and her mother haven't been close since her mother left the family on Cassie's 16th birthday, the same night a Very Bad Thing happened between her and an older boy at her school.
Cassie spends the first half of the book ignoring and resenting her mother (which I can understand. The idea that a mother would leave her daughter and husband on her daughter's birthday is awful, and this book tries to soften it up in a way that was totally unsuccessful for me. I'm sorry, but she sabotaged her relationship with her daughter for a man. It doesn't matter that the man was ill. They shouldn't have been together in the first place. And don't even get me started on the mother claiming that she 'never cheated' just because there wasn't any kissing or sleeping together. The mother was a cheater, plain and simple. She left her husband and daughter to be with another man. THAT IS CHEATING.
Aaaaaaanyway...She spends the first half holding a grudge against her mother, and on a dime their relationship changes and it's like all is forgotten. There's some schmaltzy passages on forgiveness that just don't cut it for me. Don't get me wrong, I wanted Cassie and her mother to work through their past and become close, but it didn't feel like an organic shift in their relationship to bring them closer. It felt very plot contrived.

My biggest issue with this book is that I don't understand the author's intention. We are told in the beginning of the book that male firefighters are a bunch of sexist pigs who will never accept her, what with her long hair, boobs, and emotions. She is told by her captain (who is herself female) that the only chance she has to succeed is to make them 'less aware' that she is a girl. Among the list of demands she give Cassie are:
Don't wear makeup, perfume, or lady-scented deoderant
Don't paint your nails
Don't wear jewelry
Cut your hair, or keep it back. Don't take it down or shake it or play with it. EVER
Don't giggle
Don't laugh too loud
Don't touch anybody for any reason
Don't carry a purse
Don't use the upper registers of your voice, but don't allow too much vocal fry either.
Don't sing, EVER
If you make eye contact, make it straight on, like a predator.
Don't ever admit when you don't understand. Figure it out, LIKE A MAN
If you get an injury, ignore it. Pain is for the weak.
Don't get offended by anything they (the men) might say or do.
Don't be girly
Don't talk too much
Don't have feelings

There are more, but this review is already ridiculously long.

So yeah, we're told basically that these guys are all douchebags stuck in the 1950s. And when she first meets them, there is a transition because their firehouse has never had a female firefighter. They don't have a ladies or gender-neutral bathroom. There's no place for her to sleep in the bunkhouse. The men refrain from telling dirty jokes and swearing when she's around. Oh, the humanity.
But for the most part, they aren't bad people. The author throws in sexist things here and there just to show how unenlightened these men are compared to her station back home, but really, they don't seem that different. They both employ mostly men, they both like to play practical jokes on one another, but at the end of the day, they are filled with people who are there for one another.
With the exception, of course, of the one person who hates that Cassie is there and starts stalking her. Because this book didn't have enough flipping subplots...lets add one more. Yes, one of the firefighters Cassie works with begins to stalk her and harass her for a really stupid reason. This leads to the really stupid conclusion of the book, which couldn't have been any more far-fetched and melodramatic if it had been a Hallmark movie. I won't get into specifics, but just know that Cassie is perfect and the smartest person in the room and everyone else dims in comparison.

There's one more thing that bugged me, but I couldn't fit it into another part of the review. There is a character Cassie works with at the firehouse named Tom McElroy (not that you need to remember his name, because he's never mentioned again, except as 'the fat one').

When she is describing the men, she says, "Down in Texas, everybody had been robust and tan. Here, they looked like ashtrays. And one, McElroy, was fat. Much fatter than in his photo. Genuinely fat. Heart-attack fat."

You know what, fuck that. Fuck this book for that line alone. If I hadn't been on a camping trip with nothing else to read I would've DNF'd this. As it is, I don't see myself picking up another one of this author's books in the future. What a waste of a beautiful cover.