The platitudes and occasional preaching go down pretty smoothly thanks to Adams’s sharp but good-natured wit.
In this sequel to The Godmother (2007), British author Adams coasts from chick lit to mother-hen lit.
Although Bea, 42, chose to break up her marriage to Jimmy, she still loves him. While they were married Bea worked as a journalist, but, with her mother’s financial help, she has been able to stay home with her three daughters since the divorce. Everyone with whom Bea has remained close, including Jimmy and his family, considers her a perfect mother, but overweight Bea is desperately lonely and unhappy. Just as she finds the courage to tell Jimmy she wants to try again, she learns about Tessa, Jimmy’s new love (Tessa calls him James). In her late 30s, Tessa is a slim and relatively glamorous record-company lawyer, but she’s also devoted to her friends’ children and less secure than she might appear. She assumes Bea is a superwoman/mom and struggles mightily to find a place for herself in James/Jimmy’s children’s lives. The younger two are emotionally open but 14-year-old Amber, torn by her mixed loyalties to her parents, resists. At first Bea wins readers’ sympathies and Tessa seems the interloper, but the roles become less clear cut as Tessa genuinely embraces the children while Bea embraces a “miracle diet” which consists of eating nothing while drinking to unconsciousness. Amber, who has begun an innocent romance with Tessa’s 17-year-old godson Caspar, covers for Bea until a crisis in Tessa’s parents’ lives brings Bea’s secrets out into the open. Tessa learns the truth behind Bea’s divorce: post-abortion guilt, offered as a less-than-convincing excuse for Bea’s alcoholism. Newly self-sacrificing Tessa sends James/Jimmy back to an already reformed Bea to sort out their relationship once and for all. Not to worry, he is quick to realize that there is “love” and then there is “in love.”
The platitudes and occasional preaching go down pretty smoothly thanks to Adams’s sharp but good-natured wit.Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-123265-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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