Clichéd, overcomplicated plotting and muddled characterization thwart what could have otherwise been an effective potboiler...
A young business manager discovers love, life, and family legacy as she unveils the secrets of her adoption in this sophomore romance.
Five months after her legal guardian dies in a freak accident, Leila Isidro, business manager at New York’s prestigious Golden Leaves Hotel, discovers a diary belonging to her birth mother which promises to shed light on her adoption. The diary tells the story of author Myrna Clarisse Elmer’s blossoming, yet ultimately tragic, romance with a young businessman named Anders Isidro and provides a dramatic counterpoint to Leila’s own fledgling relationship with her boss, the mysterious Denis Fraga. Leila recently suffered the indignity of discovering her fiance’s infidelity moments before marriage and has since soured on romance—“love was just another word in the dictionary, and I was determined to keep it that way”—and when history threatens to repeat itself, she escapes to Florida. But Denis refuses to give her up, even when Leila finally returns to her Spanish birthplace to meet her birth mother. In the idyllic surroundings of Vigo Bay, she faces the ultimate dilemma: Rescue the family business from bankruptcy, or follow her heart and return with Denis to New York? Veteran romance readers may be able to guess her decision with ease, but they may yet be surprised by the convoluted ending. Elsewhere, the story is plagued with Oprea’s (Forever Rose, 2016) taste for the kind of melodramatic plot devices (twin brothers, a timely inheritance, coincidences galore) that would make Dickens blush as well as a romantic male lead who presents himself as a gaslighting sexual-harassment lawsuit in the making. Leila herself trades in the usual romantic clichés—barely a page goes by without some reference to heart palpitations—and yet her inner life remains curiously barren. Similarly, no amount of florid prose can explain or excuse her birth parent’s rampant solipsism and meaningless insistence that Leila “follow [her] heart.”
Clichéd, overcomplicated plotting and muddled characterization thwart what could have otherwise been an effective potboiler romance.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-979964-18-0
Page Count: 374
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2018
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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