2011 was not a good year for Olive. She suffered heartbreaking losses at her job as an intensive care nurse; lost her...
After living one of the worst years of her life, nurse Olive Watson goes to sleep on New Year’s Eve 2011...and wakes up on New Year’s Day 2011, with the chance to make different choices.
2011 was not a good year for Olive. She suffered heartbreaking losses at her job as an intensive care nurse; lost her boyfriend, Phil, after cheating on him; alienated her best friend in the messy aftermath of the breakup; and handled her widowed mother’s new love affair poorly. So when she goes to bed, alone and lonely, on Dec. 31, 2011, and wakes up, miraculously, in Phil’s bed on Jan. 1, 2011, she realizes immediately it’s a gift from the universe, a chance to right the wrongs of the past. Finding an acquaintance who has experienced the same time oddity at first makes her feel reassured, until she understands that the woman has her own issues and not much good advice. Moving forward, Olive realizes that even if no one else remembers the past year, she does, and making choices as if she hadn’t betrayed Phil, disappointed Kerrigan or made a vast ocean of mistakes doesn’t take away the guilt or self-loathing from those actions. And sometimes, making different choices allows other people to make different choices too, with surprising and stressful consequences. An intriguing premise and some surprising twists make this an engaging, satisfying read that explores friendship, love and who we really are when it truly matters. A debut novel that offers a fascinating glimpse into one woman’s opportunity to rewrite her past and change her future.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-425-26313-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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