A solid love story about overcoming physical and emotional odds.
In Gelberg’s debut novel, workaholics Sarah and Rick are perfect for each other—until an unexpected pregnancy makes them rethink their priorities.
The novel opens with the most shocking of images: a young baby in a hospital, bleeding from every orifice. The infant survives, but it falls to Sarah Abadhi, a lawyer working for the hospital, to figure out what went wrong. The hardworking, no-nonsense attorney quickly uncovers a series of missteps by hospital staff that led to the child being given an overdose of the anti-coagulant heparin. During her investigation, she meets Rick Smith, the pediatrician who managed to save the baby’s life, and they have an immediate connection. Together, they agree the hospital should admit fault and try to avoid a lawsuit by funneling millions into correcting hospital shortages. Their plan succeeds, and they soon start a relationship outside the office. Rick, who has no desire to start a family, is perfectly content to discover that an old chlamydia infection has made Sarah infertile. However, not long after their courtship begins, Sarah becomes pregnant. Practical as always, she decides to leave the relationship to have the child, believing this may be her only chance to conceive, and relinquishes Rick of responsibility for the baby. Rick accepts these terms. The two separate but are brought together again shortly after the child is born, after a series of unpredictable events make them both re-evaluate their desires. The story’s message is ultimately a hopeful one—about forgiveness, compassion and second chances. The novel’s prose, particularly its dialogue, can be a bit flat at times (“I want us to be friends as well as lovers,” Rick tells Sarah matter-of-factly), and although the characters are likable, they don’t feel particularly complex. The overall story, however, moves along well; the plot builds nicely to keep readers sufficiently interested and curious, and its secondary characters, such as Sarah’s Jewish grandmother, add some engaging flavor.
A solid love story about overcoming physical and emotional odds.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482326222
Page Count: 358
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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