Jamie Quatro comes to Lemuria tomorrow (Thursday, January 25) to sign and talk about her new novel, Fire Sermon. We’ve already posted Jana Hoops’s interview with the author, and Lemuria’s own Kelly Pickerill’s review from the Clarion-Ledger. We’ve already selected it as our January selection for our First Editions Club, but so many of our booksellers loved the book so much, we wanted to tell you how this book’s reading experience moved us personally. We’re so excited about this book that we wanted to get you excited, too! We hope to see everybody tomorrow at 5:00.
When I first heard what the plot of Fire Sermon was, I was little hesitant. However, most of my coworkers that had read it were raving about it, so I decided to give it a shot. Boy, am I glad I did! I took this home with me for Christmas, and it was the perfect book to curl up with in front of the fire (no pun intended).
I loved Fire Sermon because the way the story is told–through thoughts and memories, making the story feel familiar. Those things comprise the inner monologue we all have when contemplating our lives, the way we retell our history to ourselves to make sure we know who we are.
Guy:
Fire Sermon reminds us how easily desire can be set alight by anticipation, and, on my favorite pages, how desire remembered is just as combustible. Quatro’s powerful writing stitches together letters and narration seamlessly to yield a dynamic and moving portrait of a life combed through. With surety, she drives home the notion that the truth unfolded and untangled looks a little different every time we find it.
Jamie Quatro brilliantly captures the relationship between spirituality and desire, the eternal and the carnal. The language was so lush, but at the same intimate, as if it were reaching into my own ideas about faith and fidelity. Thank you, Jamie Quatro, for sharing a story of humanity, even when it’s unfaithful to itself.
Quatro’s first novel is fire. She deftly flows through God and poetry here to explore the many wires that frame a life. A sensuous and heady cocktail of a book. Everyone should read this.
I loved Quatro’s lyrical writing style, how the story didn’t have a linear timeline and how thoughts varied throughout the book. I think this style of writing really gives the reader insight into the narrator’s mind and adds humanity to the novel. Even if you haven’t personally experienced some of the situations or circumstances that Quatro’s narrator has, you will still feel a connection of empathy, love, and desire to this book like you have not experienced before.
In Fire Sermon, Quatro plumbs truths about the gratification and restraint of desire, about the intimacy and estrangement of marriage, and about the steadfastness and inconsistency of faith…This is a novel that is more than the sum of its parts. Maggie is a real human being, and Quatro’s prose never judges her, so the reader can’t either… In anyone else’s hands, the level of empathy might not be as strong; Quatro adeptly depicts a messy situation with flawed people in a way that connects us with our own shortcomings.
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