More cute than romantic, this love story should appeal to young teens.
A businessman’s psychotically jealous ex-girlfriend threatens a tender relationship.
A catastrophic accident, the result of a derailed train, leaves Jake McAllister, only a young boy, fatherless. He’s haunted by nightmares of the accident until a beautiful girl shows up in his dreams and offers him the comfort he desperately needs. Years later, Jake grows up to be a wealthy businessman but becomes caught in a loveless relationship with heartless gold digger Elizabeth Carstairs. For baffling reasons, Jake is incapable of seeing the full depth of her depravity but also seems dimly aware of his lack of romantic enthusiasm for her. Meanwhile, in a parallel plotline, Yvette Corvell suffers a deep loss when her husband dies in a tragic car accident. She uses the insurance settlement money to buy a ranch in Arizona and start a new life with her daughter, nearly 5-year-old Brandi. One day a tire bursts on Yvette’s car, and she is serendipitously rescued by Jake. He soon realizes that Yvette is a dead ringer for the girl who starred in his youthful dreams. Once she is convinced Jake’s womanizing days are behind him, the two begin a relationship and fall deeply in love. But Elizabeth, bankrupt from maniacally profligate spending, refuses to let Jake go without a fight. While some edge is given to the story by Elizabeth’s chilling amorality, this is otherwise so sentimental a story it seems written for very young adults. Debut author O’Donnell is irresistibly drawn to ostentatious displays of treacly emotion. Brandi wonders out loud to a dinner table of adults if her mother plans to find her a new father soon: “Since she got me a new fish, can she get me a new daddy?” The plot’s pace happily quickens when Elizabeth starts scheming to destroy Yvette. The author turns out to be extremely adept at inventively capturing Elizabeth’s fathomless wickedness. The prose can be a bit simplistic and is hampered by punctuation errors (for example, “Robert Johnson, head of the land acquisition department said”). The book is impossibly precious, which is simultaneously its principal virtue and central vice.
More cute than romantic, this love story should appeal to young teens.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9629-0
Page Count: 306
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable...
An unlucky woman finally gets lucky in love on an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii.
From getting her hand stuck in a claw machine at age 6 to losing her job, Olive Torres has never felt that luck was on her side. But her fortune changes when she scores a free vacation after her identical twin sister and new brother-in-law get food poisoning at their wedding buffet and are too sick to go on their honeymoon. The only catch is that she’ll have to share the honeymoon suite with her least favorite person—Ethan Thomas, the brother of the groom. To make matters worse, Olive’s new boss and Ethan’s ex-girlfriend show up in Hawaii, forcing them both to pretend to be newlyweds so they don’t blow their cover, as their all-inclusive vacation package is nontransferable and in her sister’s name. Plus, Ethan really wants to save face in front of his ex. The story is told almost exclusively from Olive’s point of view, filtering all communication through her cynical lens until Ethan can win her over (and finally have his say in the epilogue). To get to the happily-ever-after, Ethan doesn’t have to prove to Olive that he can be a better man, only that he was never the jerk she thought he was—for instance, when she thought he was judging her for eating cheese curds, maybe he was actually thinking of asking her out. Blending witty banter with healthy adult communication, the fake newlyweds have real chemistry as they talk it out over snorkeling trips, couples massages, and a few too many tropical drinks to get to the truth—that they’re crazy about each other.
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable as well as free.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2803-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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