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Reviewed by Carol Thompson for Readers' Favorite
The Fire Service of Sachem City by Tom Trabulsi offers a visceral look at life inside a Rhode Island fire department on the brink of collapse. Set between 2008 and 2010, it immerses readers in the rhythms, rivalries, and camaraderie of Class 61—twenty-five recruits shaped by exhaustion, profanity, and danger. Trabulsi’s prose crackles with authenticity, grounded in a deep understanding of firefighting culture and the city’s economic decline. The story starts at the Fire Academy, where Lieutenant Robert McCarrick, a fourth-generation firefighter with a mustache as big as his temper, subjects his recruits to a tough twelve-week initiation. As the novel progresses, Trabulsi broadens the scope from the training grounds to the political and economic landscape of Sachem City, a fictional echo of post-industrial New England.
Tom Trabulsi writes with the precision of someone who has seen it all firsthand. His scenes are raw and unfiltered, filled with the jargon, structure, and rituals of firefighting life. Every page is soaked with grit: the weight of wet bunker gear, the choking smoke of condemned mills, and the dark humor that keeps the men from breaking. Yet beneath the shouting and soot lies a meditation on sacrifice: how the job consumes marriages, bodies, and souls. The novel’s realism, scope, and empathy give it the feel of an epic about working-class endurance and belonging. The Fire Service of Sachem City is a chronicle of a vanishing breed of public servants bound by duty, humor, and the ghosts of the cities they protect. Trabulsi captures their world with power, precision, and a fierce respect for those who live, and sometimes die, by the alarm.
