Amiable, though the manic narrative style can be grating.
A runaway bride, competing brothers, a potential gold digger and a 30-day “reinvent yourself” challenge provide laughs in this latest from Harbison’s good-girls-making-bad-choices arsenal.
Long ago, Quinn almost had it all: She was moments away from marrying Burke Morrison, high school’s sexiest nice guy and heir to a dreamy Virginia horse farm where Quinn would happily live. That is, until Burke’s older brother, Frank, knocked on the vestry door and dropped a bomb: Burke had been cheating on Quinn. The wedding was called off. A few days later (in a blur of rage and misery), she and Frank drove to Vegas, where they engaged in some regrettable intimacy. Ten years later, Quinn is still wondering what went wrong. Why did she trust Frank’s story? Why didn’t she talk it over with Burke? Ironically, she designs wedding dresses and comforts nervous brides, but her own romantic life is stuck in the deep freeze. When Morrison matriarch Dottie comes in to have a wedding dress made, Quinn gets plenty of opportunity to resolve her issues. Although Dottie has reached her golden years (she’s Frank and Burke’s grandmother), she still wants a little romance and has found it in Lyle, a much younger furniture salesman she met online. When they marry, Dottie will sell the farm (this is unbearable to Quinn, since she spun her best fantasies there), and soon, Frank and Burke will be in town to help her pack up—that is if they can’t dissuade her from marrying what they suspect is a gold digger. Best friend Glenn sees the strain Quinn is under and so creates daily challenges (drink all day long, try speed dating, wear a side pony) in hopes of raising Quinn's courage. With Burke and Frank both in town, Quinn can rehash the past in order to create a future. The question is, which brother will be in it?
Amiable, though the manic narrative style can be grating.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-59913-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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