Was it a horrible book? No, I guess it wasn't. I think it was quite emotional, lots of action. But - I hated every minute I spent reading this book. I didn't like neither Anne nor Danny and I really didn't care about their romance. After reading like one third of it I started skipping pages, just to finish it as fast as possible. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to keep this book and I'm not going to read the rest of the series. ( )

eh, this kind of dragged for me. ( )

[b:Consumed|38622279|Consumed (Firefighters, #1)|J.R. Ward|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1521207773s/38622279.jpg|60238189] by [a:J.R. Ward|20248|J.R. Ward|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1437768069p2/20248.jpg]
Genres; Adult, Contemporary, Romance, Suspense
3 Stars

*Note: Upon further consideration I have changed my rating to 3 stars. The more I think on this book, the more disappointed I get.

Positives & Negatives

You can tell by the shelves I have this in I, for the 1st time in my life, won a giveaway. Not just an ebook, but the real life hard copy! I was beyond excited & the fact that it is a J.R. Ward book & the 1st book in her new series sent me over the moon. I actually stroked the cover for at least 5 minutes before I ever opened it. The fire on the cover is textured. It's beautiful and I cherish it.

Now, I have to say that on my book it says 'Uncorrected Proof'. And I will tell you that I know it is going through another editing before it is released sometime in October. So please keep that in mind as you read my review. I suspect there will be quite a few differences in you copy.

The beginning of the book was fantastic and drew me in quickly, but then it let me down.
I had a hard time connecting to Anne. Her 'caution' in all her relationships was way overblown considering her reason for being that way. Some of her actions and thoughts were a bit repetitive. That said, there were a lot of qualities she had I did like. She has a very strong personality and is very independent. In some ways too much so.

I loved Danny. His problems and reasons for doing and feeling the way he does had a much better foundation than Anne's. He was funny, and sweet and caring. He also had a lot of pain from his past and his ways for dealing with that pain is self destructive. His growth in this book and his character kept me involved in the whole.

The suspense was good, but quite frankly I expected a lot more from J.R. Ward. There are a lot of areas I thought could have been 'More'. More intrigue, more danger, more suspense, more depth and fewer words. The case Anne finds herself working on is interesting, but it could have been so much better.

Just to let you know that by the time I finished the story I liked Anne a lot more.

I finished reading this 4 days ago & it took me this long to decide on my star rating and what my review would say. I wish I could have given it 5 stars because I love J.R. Ward's writing. However, in all honesty I just couldn't do it. I love her BDB series and the spin off of that. But it seems to me her contemporary stories get to wordy without the action her paranormal series contains. ( )

I had this on my TBR list for a couple of years and finally decided to read it. It was not nearly as good as I expected from the original review, and I won’t be reading any more in this series. I enjoyed reading about a woman firefighter and I felt like the details of firefighting were realistic. However, Anne was a very judgmental person and I couldn’t believe a lot of the situations that occurred throughout the book. ( )

This was really great! Old-school JR Ward! A team of firefighters work together to battle fires around the city, possibly being set by a serial arsonist. Where the book starts off with a huge explosive scene, they are on their way to a blaze, and firefighters Danny and Ann who have some history have only a few seconds to flirt on the engine before they are thrust onto the scene. The rest will be in spoilers.

The decision to have something so traumatic happen early on and have them battling the effects of it the rest of the book really drove most of the conflict. Ann had her life changed forever after the amputation, but soldiered through. Danny was unable to cope and turned to self-destructive behavior. The mystery in the background with the potential arsonist was perfectly balanced.

I also thought, compared to some books in the recent BDB series, that this one struck a good balance between POVs of other characters. We got to see snippets of other firefighters, enough to glimpse into their lives, but for the most part, things stayed tightly on Danny and Ann. There were not massive chunks of page time devoted to “villain POV” which is sometimes one of my complaints with Ward’s books. Everything just worked really well here!

This was great! Will definitely continue on.

Trigger warnings: fire, violence, murder, amputation, domestic violence, PTSD

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader. ( )