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
Balancing emotion, humor, and a redemptive theme, Higgins hits all the right notes with precision, perception, and panache.
Years after escaping her tiny Maine community and completely reinventing herself, Nora Stuart is coming home to heal from an accident, determined to forge new connections, especially with her distant mother and angry niece.
Nora grew up on a tiny Maine island and suffered her father’s abandonment, becoming an overweight, miserable adolescent, scorned by classmates and, even more devastating, by her beautiful younger sister. But when she wins a coveted scholarship, she transforms her life, shedding the weight and gaining a medical degree. She settles into an exciting life in Boston until tragedy strikes and a shaken Nora is surviving but not thriving. After she’s hit by a van, she decides to go back home to Maine to heal—both physically and psychologically—knowing it won’t be easy, since her relationship with the island and many of its residents is, well, complicated. This includes Luke Fletcher, her biggest rival for the scholarship and the island's favored son. It also includes her mother—an almost comically laconic Mainer who can barely muster a conversation with Nora but coos at her pet bird and offers “hug therapy” to wounded souls—and her niece, Poe, daughter of the aforementioned sister, who is now serving time. One friend and ally, however, is Luke’s twin, Sullivan, whose daughter, Audrey, has weight issues Nora can relate to. Nora steps in to help at the community clinic, tries to break through her mother’s prickly exterior, helps Poe and Audrey find common ground, and makes new friendships while tightening some old ones, but old and new resentments rise to the surface, too. Nora has lots to unpack and sift through, but figuring out who she is and wants to be is a powerful, entertaining journey.
Balancing emotion, humor, and a redemptive theme, Higgins hits all the right notes with precision, perception, and panache.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-488-02926-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harlequin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though Roberts (The Reef, 1998, etc.) never writes badly, her newest mystery romance is more inconsistent than most. Little Olivia MacBride, daughter of two golden Hollywood superstars, wakes up one night to see her coked-up father holding her mother’s bloody body, a scissors in his hand. After her dad is led off to prison, Liv is sent to live with her grandparents, who run a successful lodge in the Olympic rain forest on the Washington coast—a location far across the continent from the Maryland shores of Roberts’s Quinn trilogy, but one that allows her to explore another place of life-giving scenic wonder. And when Liv grows up and becomes a naturalist/guide, she gets to take us on lots of eye-dazzling tours. Into her sheltered paradise comes Noah Brady, the son of the police detective who arrested Liv’s father and has been her friend since childhood. Noah has grown up to be a bestselling true-crime writer, and, against Liv’s will, he wants to write his next book about the MacBride murder case. (Liv’s dad, about to be released from San Quentin, is dying of brain cancer.) Though Liv fights her attraction to Noah, he’s a persistent boy, and on an extended and very sexy camping trip, the two become lovers. Meanwhile, the real murderer, whose identity will probably be obvious to most readers, leaves his own trail of violence up to Washington and a final prime-evil shoot-out. Added to Roberts’s poorly drawn mystery and her interlude of swell lusty love is her usual theme of how wounded children and inner children are healed and nurtured by good nuclear families. If the conventional wisdom is true, that romance readers never tire of reruns of the same old same old, then Roberts won’t have disappointed them.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14470-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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