Fire Me by Libby Malin (Book Review)

Title: Fire Me - A Tale of Scheming, Dreaming, and Looking For Love in All the Wrong Places
Author: Libby Malin
Publisher: Sourcebooks
ISBN-13: 9781402217579
Available: May 2009
Genre: Fiction/Romance

This ARC was provided to me by Danielle at Sourcebooks - Thanks Danielle!

First sentence: Sometimes Anne Wyatt wished she could feed parts of her life into a shredder.

Anne works in the communication department at Burnham Group in DC. She works for Mitch Burnham - owner - and ex-boyfriend. It has been over for a couple of years (he had still been married at the time) but she had convinced herself that his wife didn't matter. She had broken it off with him, but it was still a blow to her self-esteem every time she saw him with someone else.

That wouldn't be happening much longer as she was resigning - today. She had found another job across the country in San Francisco at St. Bartholomew's Childrens Hospital. All she needed was to get Mitch alone for a minute so that she could tell him. Well, that wasn't happening this morning. He came in on his cell, closed his office door - and called a meeting as soon as he surfaced.

During the meeting, Mitch announced that he was going to have to lay someone off as profits were down. The person would be compensated with a nice severance package and he would make his announcement at the end of the day.

Annie's mind goes into overdrive and she plans to do everything possible to make sure she is the one who gets fired. Unfortunately, she is not the only one with that idea. Sheila, her counterpart in the office, begins to do some wacky things also! And Ken, her co-worker and secret admirer, spends the day trying to fix her gaffes. Ones he believes she is making because she is under so much pressure!

This book takes place all in the period of about 24 hours - which makes it unique in the books that I have been reading lately. I worked in the corporate world for 10 years before I became a stay-at-home mom. Her and her coworker do and say things that I wouldn't even have dreamed of doing when I was working (of course, I wasn't trying to get fired!) But that didn't stop me from imagining what the results would have been!

This was a light entertaining read - even though I felt it had the same buried message on different scales for each character. The message to embrace your life, embrace your future. Find out what makes you happy. It might be tough getting there, but if it is what you want, what you dream about - stop dreaming and get to it! It will be worth it.

Libby Malin also is offering readers an additional chapter to find out what happens between Anne and Ken at http://www.libbymalin.com/.