An effortlessly romantic read, if a bit implausible.
In this love story, a man and a woman find solace from heartache in each other.
Garrett Oliver lands his dream job, working at a resort in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee as a gardener, apprenticing under Finn Janssen, a master of his craft. Garrett’s been separated for months from his college girlfriend, Lindsay, who remains in school in Washington State, a distance that has taken its toll on their relationship. She eventually arrives in Tennessee for a short visit. But in response to his marriage proposal, she breaks up with him and quickly returns to Washington. Willow Armstrong, the recently hired general manager of the resort, overhears Lindsay on the phone speaking to what sounds like her new lover, evidence that she had already begun a relationship before leaving Garrett. Garrett is crestfallen but also immediately attracted to Willow, who experiences the same intense feelings. Meanwhile, Willow has her own reasons for romantic caution—she proposed to her own boyfriend, only to be rejected in favor of another woman. And she moved back to Tennessee to care for her increasingly ill father, an executive for a company that owns a hotel chain. Soon her life becomes even more complicated. After her father dies, she suddenly discovers that he was a multimillionaire. But she might not be his sole heir—a man steps forward who believes Willow’s father was also his own, with his birth the result of an affair. This is the second installment in Thome’s (Walland, 2016) Hesse Creek series, and it’s just as easy and pleasurable to read as its predecessor. While this sweet book revolves around the same resort and cast of characters for the most part, its enjoyment doesn’t presuppose knowledge of the series opener. The author repeats the fictional formula of her first novel as well—a relationship forged out of a powerful magnetism and shared grief—and yet again manages a mostly lighthearted mélange of tender love story and thoughtfully depicted trauma. But the plot in this volume is now too cluttered and less likely—it’s hard to imagine a woman growing up without a clue that her father was lavishly wealthy.
An effortlessly romantic read, if a bit implausible.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9978504-2-0
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Hesse Creek Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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