A feel-good Christian romance about love and redemption.
Halsch’s (Let the Rain Fall, 2008, etc.) novel tells the story of Amy and Beth Monahan, two sisters from a prosperous family who have never gotten along. The two girls lost their mother, and her gentle influence, at a young age, and their own relationship soon fell apart. Amy, the elder daughter, recalls what her mother said to her when she was young: “She simply told Amy that there was a tie that bound the hearts of Amy and Beth together, no matter what happened....They were sisters, and would always be a part of each other’s lives.” Halsch’s work is about how the sisters find that tie again. The book opens with Beth in a difficult situation and Amy ready to marry the man of her dreams. Beth traveled through Europe after leaving home two years before and soon found herself in deep trouble, eventually landing in San Francisco with a degrading job and a loveless relationship. Amy, meanwhile, took care of her widowed father and committed herself to taking over the family’s ski resort. A pregnant Beth meets Johnny Harris, who works for his own family in Lake Tahoe; he keeps showing up at Beth’s workplace, and unlike anyone else in her life, he asks only for her company. Beth lives with the father of her child, who physically abuses her when she tries to leave. Johnny intervenes, however, and Beth lives with Johnny’s family until, and after, the birth of her baby, Eden. As Amy prepares for her marriage in her childhood home, Beth comes to know the Harris family’s unconditional love and, through that relationship, begins to know God. She feels unworthy of blessings and begins a long process toward understanding that redemption is available to everyone. One day, she feels called to return home to make amends, and as a result, her entire family is irreversibly changed. Halsch closely follows the biblical story of the prodigal son in this novel, giving Amy and Beth the various emotions and motivations of that tale’s characters. From this foundation, she creates unique, well-rounded protagonists whose actions (and fears) are believable throughout, and their experiences of grace are truly compelling. The prose is straightforward, but its simplicity doesn’t detract from the novel’s message. Overall, Halsch delivers a hopeful Christian story.
A charming novel about grace and the power of family.
Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615917214
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Legacy of Beauty Books
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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