An entertaining romance novel with an engrossing plot, a conflicted heroine, and a couple of surprising, poignant takeaways.
A young poetry professor debates whether to follow her heart or mind.
At the center of this novel is Miranda—a late 20-something, New York–based poetry professor who feels content in her life, if a little bored. Miranda’s quiet existence is shaken one Thanksgiving when her stepmother alerts her that Scott Cramer, an old flame and son of a family friend whom she once considered “her brother and best friend rolled into one,” will be attending the holiday meal that year at their house outside of New Haven, Connecticut. Scott had disappeared mysteriously from her life more than six years previously, after a tender romantic moment at her apartment—leaving Miranda to pine for him and question what went wrong. When Miranda and Scott encounter each other for the first time after years of separation, it’s clear that there are still sparks between them. But there is an added complication: Scott has a child, Lynn, and not many answers about where she came from and what happened to him years before. As Miranda grapples with old, torturous feelings of unrequited love for Scott, she begins a risky relationship with a charming Irish graduate student named Ronan. She also ponders whether she should sell out by making money from the Scrabble poetry she posts on social media channels instead of pursuing the path of a traditional writer. While there’s nothing weighty in this fun, lighthearted book in terms of subject matter, the novel includes plenty of steamy sex scenes as well as some unexpected plot twists and turns. Granett (Cars and Other Things That Get Around, 2014) also includes an intriguing, relatable human dilemma as Miranda tries her new “lightness” and “no strings attached” attitude on for size. The protagonist must ultimately decide whether it is smarter to listen to the warnings of her rational brain or simply allow herself to follow what feels right to her passionate heart.
An entertaining romance novel with an engrossing plot, a conflicted heroine, and a couple of surprising, poignant takeaways.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942545-40-8
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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