A book that offers happy but not believable endings.
Reverend Elsa Montgomery has turned away from God for the third time. Can she find her way back?
Multiple RITA award-winner O’Neal (How to Bake a Perfect Life, 2010, etc.) offers this warm, comfortingly predictable romance about the healing powers of nature, love and community. After tragedy strikes her Seattle-based church community, Reverend Elsa finds herself sinking into a deep depression, grieving not only the death of a parishioner but also her own faith. Tamsin, Elsa’s sister, is worried, her own congregation insists she take a sabbatical and her oldest friend, Joaquin, drags her back home to Pueblo. Years ago, Elsa and Joaquin had nearly married, but a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago had convinced him to become a priest. Now Joaquin, better known as Father Jack, plans to help Elsa heal by convincing her to spearhead a community garden in his impoverished parish. Yet both Elsa and Joaquin have some lingering feelings for each other to work through—feelings that can no longer be ignored when the ruggedly handsome (and tellingly named) Deacon McCoy turns up as the landscaping expert. Meanwhile Tamsin has troubles of her own. Her husband has disappeared, the feds have indicted him for financial shenanigans of international proportions and her daughter just might be engaged to an Italian count. Joaquin, Elsa, Deacon, Tamsin and the community come together to clear the land, plant seeds and nurture the garden that begins to heal all of their hurts. The forces of good in this novel are well developed through the ministries of Father Jack and Elsa, as well as the many communal acts of goodness, such as the soup kitchen, the quilting circle and the garden itself. Darkness looms with gangs intent on destroying the garden and the memories of what happened in Seattle. Yet those forces of evil offer only glancing blows.
A book that offers happy but not believable endings.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-553-38678-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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