What could be an examination of class distinctions in Victorian England disappoints with unrealistic characters and turns of...
A young girl tries to make her way in the slums of 19th-century London in Annand's debut novel.
Gladys Tunner is born into poverty to alcoholic parents unable to properly care for her. But as an attractive and charming young girl, she finds allies in fellow youth Toughie and a midwife named Sally, both of whom protect her and teach her how to survive. But Gladys has to flee her home after her parents attempt to sell her for a night to their landlord, forcing her to make a life of her own in the English countryside, a world she never knew existed. Helped along the way by strangers, Gladys uses her wit and quick thinking to move through the class hierarchy that once kept her family in squalor. The story moves quickly but at the cost of character development and context that could meaningfully place the reader in the chaos and danger of the times. Instead, the author relies on shallow stereotypes and one-dimensional characters, with brief passages of dialogue that read as wooden and unnatural. For example, when she fears she has killed someone, Gladys says to the man who helps her flee to a train station, "There's one leaving for somewhere called Dover at four in the morning. That's not long, Mr O, so don't you worry about me; I can wait alone. You had better go home, or Mrs O will be worried." The 19th-century England that Gladys lives in is full of abnormally perceptive people, strangers ready to offer a helping hand, and no sense of true danger for a young girl with no formal education or social standing. It’s not only unbelievable, but ultimately tedious.
What could be an examination of class distinctions in Victorian England disappoints with unrealistic characters and turns of good fortune.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9972377-9-5
Page Count: 377
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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
An entertaining page-turner.
Terri Rayburn is devastated that her perfect man belongs to someone else, but once Nate Taggert realizes that Terri's the one for him, her complicated past still stands in the way of their being together.
Terri is attracted to Nate the moment she lays eyes on him, and soon they fall into an easy partnership at the Virginia lake resort she runs with her father. Nate is upfront about being engaged to the mayor’s daughter, Stacy, but she’s in Europe for a few weeks, and it quickly becomes clear to Terri that Nate and Stacy aren’t a great match. However, Terri, whose mother left when she was 2, has always had a problematic relationship with the citizens of Summer Hill. Since Leslie disappeared, the town gossip has made sure everyone remembers her as a promiscuous vixen, a label which tainted Terri as she got older and made her look like a problem when, as Nate begins to understand, she was really a victim. It’s clear to everyone around them that they are falling in love, but even as Nate realizes it himself, Terri is adamant that they can’t be together. She won’t steal him from the popular Stacy because it would mean she’d never be able to live in Summer Hill, and she won’t abandon her father. Deveraux spins an intriguing and unorthodox romance, continuing her Summer Hill branch of the Taggert/Montgomery series with two characters who have some unique, interesting obstacles in their paths and navigate through them with secrets uncovered and old wounds healed. The story is well plotted, though Nate is unnecessarily oblivious sometimes and the book takes an unexpected swing into romantic suspense territory in the last quarter. The solved mystery resolves Nate and Terri’s conflict, though the villain’s motivations seem a little cartoonish.
An entertaining page-turner.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-5124-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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