by Linda Lu
‘Other Fires’ by Lenore H. Gay is a novel of corrosive family secrets, the search for the truth and the challenges that life throws at us.

Joss and Phil’s marriage has been on shaky ground ever since he cheated on her, but a fire in their family home sets things spinning in an entirely different direction. Instead of deciding to leave her husband, Joss finds herself having to care for him in his hospital bed. Worse still, Phil is diagnosed with Capgras syndrome, a neurological disease that often makes it impossible to recognize one’s own loved ones. Because of a head injury that happened when he was trying to escape the fire, when Phil wakes up from an induced coma, he believes that his wife has been replaced by an impostor of some kind.

Joss is unsure how to treat Phil. The burden of caring for their two small daughters is placed entirely on her shoulders, and she has a manuscript on mythology that she must finish before the deadline a few months away. Her oldest daughter, Terpe, becomes obsessed with the idea that she must figure out how the fire started in their home and launches her own personal investigation into the incident.

Meanwhile, a local electrician named Adam arrives at the house to rewire the top floor, which was damaged in the fire. Adam is a sweet, naive man who lives with his mother who recently left town without informing him of where she was going. Trying to navigate the world on his own for the first time, Adam immediately clings to Joss because of her worldly knowledge and the two begin having an affair.

This novel explores and untangles the relationships between these four characters and how the fire affected their different perspectives. The wealth of emotion that Lenore H. Gay writes with is apparent and brings out a richness of prose that makes this a worthwhile read.

Other Fires is a character-driven story. Each character has their chapters. This format gives the reader that character's perspective. Instead of reading a book, the characters tell the story. Each character is well defined.

Terpe is a third-grade girl. The older of two children in this family. The other child is a baby girl. Terpe and her mother Joss are the main characters. This book tells their story through the eyes of a kid and the eyes of a woman. Joss grows through introspective thinking while Terpe sees life as more black and white. Right and wrong.

Phil is the father/husband. At the beginning of Other Fires, this family of four’s house goes up in flames in the middle of the night. Phil sustains severe head and brain injuries landing him in the hospital and rehab for the duration of the story. When Phil is ready to see people, he swears Joss is not his wife. She’s an imposter. He remembers everyone else. This medical condition following an injury to the brain does exist. The choices Phil has made since Joss and he had the second baby girl very questionable, to say the least.

Other Fires is about how this family gets through this crisis. Adam is an electrician hired to work on the burned up part of the house. Adam is quite a character himself. He’s a bachelor living alone.

The thing about this book is how well the characters are written. You meet them for the first time when their first chapter appears. It’s natural to form an opinion as each character develops. All the characters are very complex.

Each character comes to life on their own and as seen through the other characters. Terpe tells about her friends. Joss, her mom, has a surprisingly different take on these friends. Adam, on his own, comes off as slow. Surprisingly, he is a different person when he meets Joss. It seems every chapter has something surprising in it.

I found this book stunning. The saying don't judge a book by its cover is the only way to describe this book. A love story. A tragedy. Very unpredictable and suspenseful.

𝐇𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐝𝐨, 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐚𝐥𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐚𝐝 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞.

This novel tells the story of a marriage already falling apart when, through an accident during a housefire, the husband Phil suffers a head injury and is diagnosed with Capgras syndrome. This delusion leads him to believe his wife is an imposter. Joss is already fighting to be supportive, caring for their two girls, longing for the order of their old life before her husband started accusing her of being the fake Joss, even if he was a liar and a cheat. Certainly Phil was failing his family before the nightmare, bored by the lack of mental stimulation fatherhood in the early years leads to, already reluctant to watch their girls, leaving it all on Joss’s shoulders. Then there is their daughter Terpe, already feeling like a freak at school with a weird name that doesn’t help, certainly a father who seems to be losing his grasp on reality isn’t going to fix her reputation, best she not tell anyone. It’s hurtful and confusing, will Terpe’s daddy ever get better? She is so much her father’s daughter, a scholar in the making. How come he recognizes her just fine, doesn’t think his own children are imposters, if he is suffering from such a syndrome? There doesn’t seem to be logic to his thinking and she’s too smart to let it go. She wants to understand but the adults make no sense!

The fire and it’s cause is a troubling puzzle for Joss, she chews on the reality that it could easily be one of Phil’s women, maybe a spurned lover? From the start she fights herself to be supportive of his strange condition but wants nothing more than to just end it, how can she give her love to the very man she has started to feel hatred and resentment towards? In many ways, his injury is a result of his philandering, forced out of their marital bed, sleeping separately. When she imagines the future, she can’t seem to figure Phil in. Caring for anyone with a serious illness or injury can be trying enough for a stable marriage, but with the added weight of betrayal and now his brutal rejection of her very identity it seems like an insurmountable obstacle. Add the burden of fixing up their home that suffered serious damage, a deadline for her book she has an extension for and won’t meet, she feels like her head will explode. Adam is the electrician hired to work on the wiring, and immediately they take to one another, sharing memories, conversations that stave off the loneliness consuming them both. Adam’s past is a festering wound from when his father physically abused him during childhood and now his mother is causing him worry and grief. His sleep tormented by strange, often frightening dreams and his waking hours a struggle to stay sober. Joss is an interesting, beautiful woman, one who has him longing, someone so much smarter, richer than him, but does she have her life together?

As Phil struggles with his own fuzzy thoughts, he knows that having their second child led to more responsibilities and demands in his marriage. Why did they have her? Then there is his own childhood that taught him how good lies felt. Who can he trust? Not false Joss, maybe not even his oldest daughter Terpe who could be ‘colluding’ with his fake wife. How can he trust himself, with his mind all over the place? It is the woman who visits him that has him remembering what he was up to before the accident, that has him recalling just when his real wife disappeared and the imposter took over. Does he really want to go back to that home, to a woman who isn’t his wife? Could there be a better solution?

Terpe is forced to deal with grown up situations when she sneaks in to see her father at the rehabilitation center, from then on her mother can no longer protect her from all the lies in their little family. Both her parents seem to be acting out and Terpe hates it! She is sick of being at the neighbors alongside her little sister, no one thinks she understands anything just because she is a kid, but she sees so much more than they know. That Terpe loved her daddy so much is interesting considering her didn’t put much time in, isn’t that part of Joss’s complaint? Then again, children try so hard with the parent who is often disengaged.

Will this family ever be able to overcome all their troubles, will Phil ever recover from his strange condition?

I like Terpe, she is the reason I kept reading. I wish Phil and Joss’s interactions went further, deeper. It was a great idea, that the husband who has been keeping his own secrets, faking it in his own way and an adept liar gets injured and accuses his wife of being an imposter- that could have gone so many ways. Who wouldn’t find it infuriating, struggle with the morality of it all? How can you just walk away when your spouse needs you, despite whether they deserve your help based on betrayal. I liked it, but mostly because I wanted to see how it ended for Terpe. I liked the ending but it would have been far more riveting had there been more confrontations between the spouses.

Published October 20, 2020

She Writes Press

When a tragic house fire occurs, the lives of 3 individuals, Terpe, Joss and Adam, intersect. Young Terpe awakens in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke. She is able to get her baby sister out safely, but her father, Phil, suffers a head injury before she and her mother, Joss, can pull him to safety. While Phil is in hospital, Adam,an electrician, enters their lives, when he comes to fix damage from the fire. He seems to be a loser, with his own ghosts.
Terpe, Joss and Adam all suffer some sort of psychological problems, stemming from their childhood. This is a story of their growth as individuals and coming to terms with their past.
The father suffers from Capgras misindentication syndrome, where a person sees a person, that they know, but can't relate to them and think they are a "fake" person, who is pretending to be the "real" person. I found this interesting, because it is similar to some people, with a certain type of dementia. My grandmother had atrophy of the brain, after a fall backwards down a flight of stairs, and would say to us, "Who are you?"
This is a powerful story, which will make you think, how different events, some uncontrollable and some not, affect a person.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3609519084

Thank you to NetGalley for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review. 

Strange book, written in shifting POV but with no difference in the voices. Overall unlikable characters and weak plot.  

Three stars because I did feel compelled to finish it although there was no satisfying closure or true denouement.

Lenore H Gay – Other Fires – Reviewed 9/25/20 – Read 8/29-9/2/20

He sees me, but tells me that I am fake, or is he faking?

Joss & Phil are from different backgrounds, but things just seem to click! Now years later and two children, things are falling apart. I know that he is cheating, but why? What happened? I am trying, but is he? So many questions, too many to answer tonight!

I hear Terpe, my oldest, yelling Fire! Fire! I answer, Ok, I am up! I tell Terpe to get the baby and take her outside, where is your father? Terpe tells me that he is still upstairs. I run upstairs and find Phil asleep on the pullout bed. Phil, for God’s sake there is a fire, don’t you hear the alarms? Ok, Ok, I am coming. We start back down the stairs and I hear something crack and two boards hit him, causing him to fall to the floor with a scream. He is on fire when he hits the bottom of the stairs. I tell Terpe to get outside and start back to help Phil. On the way, I grab a throw rug so I can roll him to put out the fire. Terpe stops on the way out, and she calls 911, telling them we need help.

Terpe runs outside and puts the baby down on a blanket that she had wrapped her in, and runs back inside to help her mom. Dad is big, weighing around 200 lbs., mom will not be able to get him outside by herself. Together they manage to get him out of the house just as the fire trucks arrive. They load dad into the ambulance, mom gets in with him, yelling at me to go to the neighbors, and get help from the O’Tooles.

And now the story begins…

What did I like? This was a very emotional and complicated story. I was enticed from the beginning. Unfortunately, this happens in more families than we want to admit too. When a couple falls in love, they are footloose and fancy-free. Then kids come along, the first one is fun and unique, but then the second one arrives and all the fun is gone. The difficulties added to this story is amazing, without giving away the plot, I could see where it would have completely disrupted the family life, as compared to the beginning. Then when you add in the psychological aspect for Phil, you have a recipe for disaster.

Of course, and thankfully, this is not the norm. When you have a couple that has that loving nurture to them, it would be impossible for it to happen in their case. For the sake of children, we all hope that that nurture is in all families!

What will you like? As I said previously, this is a very complicated storyline that is incredible. The different emotional problems that the marriage spells out will have you hooked from the very first page. As the storyline goes, and you start seeing the other problems, your heart will break for everyone involved. I was completely unaware of the medical condition of Capgras Misidentification Syndrome, but after reading this book it shows you how something like this could happen. Makes you wonder if this has happened more times than it as been diagnosed?? Wonderfully written with lots of descriptions and details. You can tell Lenore knows her subject. This is an excellent read that will enfold you all the way through, it certainly has a very unexpected ending that shocked me. Never did I see that coming!!! This book will be available on 10/20/20, be sure to mark your calendar!

Having a psychology background, I was intrigued by the premise of this book, namely the aftermath of a traumatic head injury on the individual and the family.

Rousted out of their beds by a fire, Phil, Joss and their two children flee their home, but not before Phil sustains smoke inhalation and a blow to the head from falling beams. For days afterward, Phil is intubated and kept in a medically induced coma while his life hangs in the balance. When he awakens, he does not recognize his wife. He was developed a significant long-term complication called Capgras Delusion. This condition is characterized by an inability to emotionally connect with people the individually knows while visually recognizing something familiar about them. The individual often thinks the other person is an “imposter.” Additionally, the marriage between these two was on rocky ground due to Phil’s infidelity. This is the dilemma the Joss faces as she attempts to plan for the future of her family. The story is told through alternating chapters featuring Joss, Terpe, her eight year old daughter, and a third character named Adam.

I have great respect for the commitment and courage it takes to be a professional writer. That said, I found that this author’s style was not a good match for me. I could not engage with the characters in any meaningful way; I just didn’t really care about them. Each one had a back story that explained their dysfunctional behavior, but the collective angst was too much. The dialogue felt contrived and mundane. The storyline unfolds in a stilted, fragmented manner. A quarter of the way into the book, I simply set it aside instead of forcing myself to continue reading.

It was clear to me that the author is very knowledgeable about the subject matter and has an appreciation for the psychological and social ramifications of chronic illness.

My thanks to She Writes Press and NetGalley for providing the opportunity to review a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.