Shreve’s seventh novel (Pilot’s Wife, 1998, etc.) is a pleasantly atmospheric fin-de-siäcle tale of high-society adultery, in which love ultimately triumphs for a gorgeously written heroine who seems to belong in a different century. At a time when women don—t show their ankles in public, Olympia Biddeford embarks on a summer 1899 idyll on the New Hampshire shore. With grace and understatement, Shreve evokes 15-year-old Olympia’s emerging sexuality, her family cottage on Fortune’s Rocks, and the bright, sea-clean season. The perfect complement to the heroine’s enchanted world is Dr. John Haskell, a physician and writer who provides care to the poor of a nearby mill town. Despite his wife and children, Haskell and Olympia fall in love and are soon caught in flagrante. Disgraced, the Biddeford family leaves Fortune’s Rocks for Boston, where Olympia discovers she is pregnant. She gives birth, the child is taken to an orphanage, and Olympia is exiled to a western Massachusetts convent. Olympia eventually returns to the cottage at Fortune’s Rocks to rebuild her life. She seeks out and finds her lost son, and files a suit to recover him. The trial (a very ’90s concoction, with ethnic and class conflict at its heart) is stirring, and though Olympia wins—the adoptive parents are too grubby to raise the boy correctly’she refuses the victory when she sees their pain. Haskell returns from his exile in the West, where he has been treating immigrants and Native Americans, to find Olympia’s love for him still strong. They marry, and, sensing the distant strains of political correctness, convert the cottage into a birthing center for unmarried women. Olympia leaps out in sharp focus from the first page, but the conscientiously tangled plotting and the muddle it provokes in her show the strain of transplanting a millenial sensibility back a hundred years.($200,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-78101-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
A little slower-paced than the typical Roberts romantic mystery (Black Hills, 2009, etc.) but every bit as steamy. It may...
A dog trainer and a wood craftsman dance around love and danger in the Pacific Northwest.
Fiona Bristow is the only victim who got away from serial killer George Perry. Now a copycat, inspired and perhaps guided by the jailed Perry, is on her trail. After Perry murdered her fiancé, Fiona rebuilt her life as a dog trainer and search-and-rescue expert on lovely Orcas Island. She’s recently met talented woodworker Simon Doyle and his misbehaving puppy Jaws, and her dormant love life is about to revive as she and the reluctant Simon slowly build a complicated relationship. Though she’s done her best to overcome her fears and make herself whole again, this new series of killings, with herself as the ultimate target, can’t help but strain her nerves. As the police and FBI track the killer, a persistent reporter makes Fiona’s life more difficult by printing information about her life and location. Through it all, Fiona keeps working. As she continues to go on rescue missions with a team that may soon include Simon and Jaws, her friends help to keep her balanced. But ultimately it will be the trust she has built up with Simon and the talents of her dogs that will change her life forever.
A little slower-paced than the typical Roberts romantic mystery (Black Hills, 2009, etc.) but every bit as steamy. It may well add dog lovers to her legion of fans.Pub Date: July 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15657-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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