Faces in the Fire - Beginning or almost Finished??

T.L. Hines Faces in the Fire is the third book in my Reading Through Summer project. So far, I am a little more than half way through it. Immediately picking up this book I was intrigued. The first chapter (instead of being 1) was numbered 34. In the book store I stepped back a minute, reexamined the book then checked the shelves to make sure it wasn’t a sequel. Once positive I had the one and only, my interest was sparked and I had to read it.

Beginning the book I was put into a reality that, usually, I’m laughing at while it flashes on the TV. Yet, what I give credit to T.L. Hines for is that I instantaneously believed every word I was reading. In the first stanza T.L. Hines casually introduces a man who hears ghosts in the clothing of dead people and does nothing but lock them up to channel their voices into his art. Instead of laughing I was captivated by the sheer strangeness of the character’s (Kurt) reality. The second stanza focuses on Corrine, a cancer patient trying to survive any way she possibly can. I would love to go into a deeper description of her, yet I fear I’d give too much away. What I can say is Corrine is a person comfortable with who she is yet on the way to learning she can be so much more. I’ve just started the third stanza and it focuses on a woman named Grace, a druggie tattoo artist.

These characters all have wildly different lives with one thing in common; they’re all running from the past. During a therapy session Todd (Kurt’s therapist) refers to him as a shark. Because it is impossible for sharks to move backwards, they must constantly be moving forward to stay alive. Todd says that Kurt has fallen into this trap of not turning around and facing his past and his demons. Corrine is always running away from danger that just seems to keep finding her. So far I’ve read that Grace has been running from her family and her responsibility to them. She believes that she just isn’t good enough for them and that they’re better off without her.

As I read on, I began to understand the pattern T.L. Hines uses for his chapters, though I still didn’t fully comprehend how they fit together. Faces in the Fire is divided into four stanzas, each containing their own number of chapters. I am thoroughly enjoying watching it all come together as the story unfolds itself.