High-grade romance energized by environmental awareness: not a toxic mix.
Best-selling Delinsky (Lake News, 1999, etc.) imagines 21st-century life in the town that inspired Grace Metalious’s notorious novel.
Annie Barnes also comes from Middle River, N.H., even though she now lives in Washington, D.C., and Annie’s nearing the two-million-copy mark for her third novel, though of course that doesn’t match Grace’s sales. When Annie returns home after her mother’s death, everyone in town, including her sisters Phoebe and Sabina, is convinced she’s there to expose all of Middle River’s dirty little secrets. (Readers will have to take it on faith that small-town folks can be as idiotically accusative as Delinsky makes them here.) About 70 percent of Middle River’s income derives from the Northwood paper mill, ruled by awful Aidan Meade. Now 33 and on his third marriage, Aidan once stood up plain-Jane Annie for the high-school prom (he was having an affair with a married woman). No, she’s not out for vengeance; she just wants to know whether her mother’s fatal illness, the symptoms of which are now replicated in Phoebe, is related in any way to mercury waste from the paper mill. The author’s research on mercury poisoning gives this story some stature above that of its agonizingly small-minded characters. (Just in case that’s too high-minded, Delinsky throws in an underaged teenager having sex on a dark road and a police chief addicted to painkillers.) Annie gets a list of people whose sicknesses may stem from mercury poisoning. The townsfolk get more and more upset with her. Soon Grace appears inside Annie’s head, and the pair of writers begin an endless conversation. Meanwhile, Annie starts running in the morning and meets fellow jogger James Meade, Aidan’s handsome, well-spoken brother. She gets her big break when a mysterious correspondent begins telling her secrets via e-mail. Will the truth come out at last?
High-grade romance energized by environmental awareness: not a toxic mix.Pub Date: July 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4644-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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