Setting Fires: A Novel
By Kate Wenner
4/5
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About this ebook
The novel begins with a pair of phone calls that shatter Annie's contentment forever. The first brings news that Annie's country house in Connecticut has burned, in an area where two other Jewish-owned buildings have also recently burned down. The second and far more distressing call informs Annie that her beloved father -- the family patriarch, burdened by a lifelong shame that Annie will soon uncover -- has been diagnosed with cancer.
Gradually, as Annie and her father forge a new and closer bond, he is able to acknowledge his history of poverty, his struggle for survival, and the near-tragedy it led to. Annie's determination to help her father find peace and forgiveness before dying meshes inextricably with her determination to find and expose the anti-Semitic arsonist who threatens her own family.
Annie's passionate search reaches back four generations from the early roots of the Fishman clan in Russia and New York to the modern-day lives of Annie, her siblings, and their divorced parents. At the same time, it throws Annie's relationships with her own husband and children into chaos, and rocks the family life on which she has always depended for stability and support. Not until Annie discovers and resolves the final truths -- by her own wit, perseverance, and self-knowledge -- can she reestablish the harmony she treasures.
Kate Wenner, an award-winning former producer of 20/20, makes a startling fiction debut in this powerful novel about a courageous woman's struggle to come to terms with a complex family history.
Kate Wenner
Kate Wenner was raised in California during the 1950s, graduated from Harvard, and traveled throughout Europe, the Middle East, East Africa, and Central and South America before moving to New York, where she spent fourteen years as an award-winning producer for ABC's 20/20. Wenner is the author of the novel Setting Fires and a memoir, Shamba Letu: An American Girl's Adventures in Africa. She lives in New York City and the Berkshires with her husband, artist Gil Eisner, and their two children.
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Reviews for Setting Fires
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Katherine Kurs In this rich and riveting novel, Kate Wenner deftly weaves together themes of family and tradition, longing and fear, spiritual yearning and ancestral memory. I became totally caught up in the lives of these very real characters whose struggles and triumphs of heart and mind have remained with me long after the novel's end. -- ReviewThankfully, the main story has enough life to keep bobbing to the surface and making waves. Hate and love, sin and redemption, after all, are eternal and powerful forces, and Wenner depicts their pull and push amid the mundanedetails of daily life. Waldmas investigates alleged anti-Semitism in the hills of New England, but first she has to find the baby-sitter. She and hubby want to collect on their fire insurance and rebuild their dream house, but first they have to carp at one another over the chores. - Beliefnet, Aug. 2000As you all know from my recent post, Setting Fires by Kate Wenner, I started reading it a few days ago. The book was an easy read and hard to put down. From the first sentence of the chapter to the last page, it was a journey that somewhat similar to mine or so to speak. The book is about the life of Annie Waldmas and how she coped with the death of her family, experiences an anti semitic, and the reconnection with broken family ties. The tale talks about live and the mistakes people made through it, the gain and lost of love, how a person sees life inspite of death and how one should move on inspite the loss.It's basically a daughter-father story that touched me entirely. As some of you might now, I don't have a good relationship with my father and reading the novel made me think some things. Does the though of eath really change everything. When one person is faced with the reality ofpassin on to the next life, do you really see life differently? Reading the book made me cry. I'm a cry baby but this is the first time I cried reading a book, a first I must say! I've read a lot of nice lines throughout the book and even highlighted them which is not my thing.