Things We Set on Fire - Deborah Reed

I really want to give this book 4 Stars, but there's just something a little missing to get it over that hump.

Things We Set on Fire starts off really strong. Vivie commits a terrible act. She shoots her husband as he's out illegally hunting, which in turn makes it look like a hunting accident. This event is the gravitas around which all other events in the book get their weighty meaning. And for whatever reason, it just doesn't work.

Fast forward about twenty-five years and we are again shown Vivie getting a call from the police that her two granddaughters who she hasn't seen in six years, are in need of shelter after their mother has been admitted to the hospital.

Drugs? That's Vivie's thought, although later on in the book it's not really clear why this would have been her guess. In any case, Vivie takes in Kate's two daughters and calls Kate's sister Elin who lives in Oregon. Vivie and the girls are in Florida, but Elin agrees to come and drives all the way to see them.

Elin has lived in Oregon for about 8 years, having unceremoniously packed up and left Florida behind. She was trying to escape the heaviness of her life there and created a new life for herself in Oregon. When she arrived in Oregon she found that her longtime boyfriend had moved on... to her sister. This man is the father of the two girls who Elin becomes the caretaker of.

This all happens in the very first chapters of the book and the momentum builds as it is apparent that the Elin is aware of her mother's action from long ago and no one has spoken of it. But then something happens with the book, where the characters, and their background stories don't really match up with their current actions. The reason for Kate's hospitalization is laid bare, but there isn't really any time dedicated to getting the characters through their processing of events. Instead they have these wholesale realizations and understandings that don't really ring true.

The book meandered toward the end and the ending was overall not very satisfactory. So while the writing was great and the story line good, the book just missed some element to push it over into a four-star rating.

Three stars.