Things You Save in a Fire

Most of Center’s novels, including Things You Save in a Fire, fall into the genre of contemporary romance. Contemporary romances are categorized by their happy endings and familiar plotlines, but they often focus on the main characters’ personal growth and the obstacles they must overcome to get to their happy ending. As in Things You Save in a Fire, most contemporary romance heroines and heroes are flawed, but they often help each other to overcome the barriers that prevent them from being able to become romantically involved. Additionally, this novel falls into a popular subgenre of 21st-century romance novels: the workplace romance. As with the broader category of contemporary romance, the subgenre also involves recurring plots, tropes, archetypes, and situations. The one thing required of a workplace romance is that the romantic leads are co-workers, an issue that often makes their love complicated if not explicitly prohibited.

Things You Save in a Fire uses many tropes typical of contemporary workplace romance novels, such as forced proximity, a plot device used frequently in the novel, as it forces characters like Cassie and Owen to be near one another despite their desire not to get involved. Fake dating is another common workplace romance trope, used in this novel and others like Rachel Lynn Solomon’s The Ex Talk and Elena Armas’s The Spanish Love Deception. Though these tropes are not exclusive to workplace romances, they work especially well in this subgenre, as the pressure for the characters to uphold a certain image of themselves is particularly important at work and can have major complications for their careers. Contemporary workplace romances also tend to highlight the inherent misogyny of traditionally male-dominated career paths. Ali Hazelwood’s Love on the Brain and Center’s The Bodyguard are two other novels in this genre that draw attention to the ways women must work twice as hard just to be accepted among the men in their profession.