A gripping novella embedded in a thick tome of largely irrelevant window dressing.
Clichéd and overlong novel about war photographers coping with PTSD, love affairs and family secrets.
Bradford’s protagonist, 30-year-old Serena, is a combat photographer who has left the front lines to pen a biography of her late father, Tommy, founder of a photojournalism empire and a former war correspondent himself. When another photojournalist, ex-boyfriend Zac, is brought from Afghanistan to Venice by a mutual friend, Serena, summoned to his side to help him decompress, finds herself falling for him all over again. The scene shifts to Nice, where Serena reconnects with her older twin sisters, Cara and Jessica, at a villa inherited from their late mother, a movie star of Elizabeth Taylor stature. Over many, many glasses of pink Veuve Clicquot and cups of tea, repetitious conversations belabor mostly peripheral and insignificant details—about Cara’s and Jessica’s unadventurous love lives, an upcoming anniversary celebrating their departed parents and Zac’s continuing recovery from a trauma that was never rendered convincingly in the first place. It isn’t until two-thirds in that a potentially riveting “secret from the past” emerges: While combing through her father’s archives, Serena finds a cache of photographs revealing that Tommy may have dallied briefly with another war photographer, Valentina. There are photos of a very pregnant Val, with a disturbing caption suggesting that Serena may not be a movie star’s daughter after all. Serena can get no confirmation of her origins from her sisters or her father’s closest friends. But Zac distracts her from this dilemma with another. Although he promised to give up war-zone reporting forever, he wants to go to Libya to cover the rebellion against Gadhafi. And he insists on taking Serena, now his fiancee, with him. Serena has an ulterior motive for agreeing: Val is now in Libya. But that’s not the most distressing information she’s withholding from Zac. However, the prodigious amount of front-loaded exposition may discourage readers long before the excitement starts.
A gripping novella embedded in a thick tome of largely irrelevant window dressing.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-63166-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
IN THE NEWS
An entertaining, affecting romance.
A downtrodden nanny sends off a quick note of appreciation to a soldier; when it lands on a major’s desk, it sparks an unexpected romance, but things get complicated once he's back on U.S. soil.
Sara Ryan needs a change. She loves her niece, Kaylee, but being the girl's nanny for the past three years has made it too easy for her brother and sister-in-law to duck their parenting responsibilities while taking advantage of her time and kindness. Sara's widowed mother depends on her, too, and now that Sara has spent years taking care of her family, they've become dependent and entitled while continually chipping away at her self-esteem. Then, when she hears a radio story about sending letters to troops serving abroad, Maj. Gabriel Randall comes into her life. He responds to her letter with an email, which leads to texts, FaceTime, and a full-blown emotional affair—and finally an airline ticket to Alaska for Sara to spend time with Gabriel at the end of his deployment. But Sara has confided to no one but a cousin about the correspondence, and as the day she’s supposed to leave for Alaska grows closer, she continues to keep her silence, creating confusion and turmoil when events force her to face her choices head-on. James (a new pen name for established author Sydney Landon) takes on a kind of mashup of “Cinderella” and soldier pen-pal fantasy, in a sweet, touching way. It is frustrating how reactive Sara is until the very end—even understanding that that’s supposed to be her growth arc—and how everyone else solves her problems, but the ultimate meshing of two lonely souls through a seemingly fated letter makes for a tender, satisfying love story overall.
An entertaining, affecting romance.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0695-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Jove/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Flamboyantly written, if a little too conventionally peopled and plotted.
A treasure hunt leads a young girl to discover her mother’s darkest secret.
In 1936, 9-year-old Alice has been consigned by her mother, Selina Lennox Carew, to the care of her Lennox grandparents at their ancestral stately home, Blackwood Park. The reason for this custodial arrangement is Selina’s trip to Southeast Asia with Alice’s cold, distant father, Rupert, who needs to visit his ruby mines in Burma. Alice is kept abreast of her parents’ travels through her mother’s letters, delivered by longtime family servant Polly. Alice is also directed, by Polly, to discover clues set by her mother, leading the girl on a treasure hunt that helps lift her out of her depression. Alice’s Blackwood sojourn alternates with chapters set in 1925, when young Selina, age 22, is setting the London tabloids ablaze with her antics as one of a cadre of Bright Young People, devil-may-care upper-class flappers and their escorts. But everything changes when, on a madcap treasure hunt of her own, Selina meets Lawrence Weston, a struggling portrait painter and aspiring photographer. The two are drawn inexorably into an affair. Selina's choice of a passionless marriage to Rupert over life with her soul mate, Lawrence, is the fateful decision on which the novel turns, and her rationalizations will be a little too pat to satisfy most readers. Nor will readers be long baffled by Alice’s hunt—given the 1925 backstory, the solution to the puzzle is obvious almost from the start. But genuine surprises do await, even if they entail punishing Selina, after the manner of post-Code Hollywood melodrama, for her breach of class boundaries, disregard for propriety, and unladylike smoking and drinking. The characters verge on stereotypical although there are no true villains and only the domestics lack flaws, particularly Polly and Mr. Patterson, the gardener who introduces Alice to the redemptive joys of nature. However, Grey’s use of sensory detail, enlivening the most mundane of scenes, redeems this novel, too.
Flamboyantly written, if a little too conventionally peopled and plotted.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-06679-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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