This novel’s romantic problems often fall into routine patterns, but Leuthold’s insights into the transformative power of...
Leuthold’s debut novel explores the lives and loves of an author and one of her devoted readers.
Alexandria Zenobia “Xan” Alexander enjoys her successful career as a writer. Under the pen name XZA, she’s published several edgy, controversial novels that explore the challenges faced by young women. She’s strong and independent, particularly when it comes to relationships. At a book signing, she impulsively flirts with a handsome book reviewer named Michael Singer. Ten years later, Xan is living with him and struggling to find the perfect ending to her latest book. At the same time, she’s trying to come to terms with her past in order to understand why her relationship with Michael has endured. As Xan’s story unfolds, Leuthold offers a parallel narrative about a college student named Jessie. When she receives an unexpected gift of one of Xan’s novels from a former student named Willa, it reignites their friendship. As they bond over the book, Jessie starts to re-evaluate her school and career goals and her on-again, off-again relationship with her unsupportive boyfriend, Dick. Jessie provides an intriguing foil for Xan; although they’re at different stages in their lives, both question why they’re staying in their respective relationships. Unfortunately, these relationships also provide some of the book’s weaker moments. Michael is the perfect lover, caring, loyal and supportive, while Dick is rude, boorish and belittling, which leads to clichéd dilemmas, such as Xan wondering why she’s unable to say “I love you” to Michael and Jessie reflecting on why she clings to her unhealthy relationship. However, the author does skillfully keep the two main plots and multiple supporting characters clear and cohesive while also weaving in passages from XZA’s books. As the chapters alternate between Xan’s and Jessie’s stories, the fictional book passages show Xan’s character and her point of view as a writer.
This novel’s romantic problems often fall into routine patterns, but Leuthold’s insights into the transformative power of literature keep the narrative from becoming predictable.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0991131914
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Green Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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