Roll out a beach towel and pour a glass of prosecco for this perfect read for a summer getaway.
Food, wine, and romance abound in Costa’s debut novel.
Kit and Bridget are spending the summer in the beautiful town of Positano, situated on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. Determined to fit in with the locals, the two American teachers rent an apartment for the summer and invite all their friends to visit while they’re vacationing abroad. The women are immediately swept up in the Positano social scene, reuniting with friends and lovers from previous summers. Stunning, bubbly Kit attracts Italian men like flies to honey. Yet she finds herself sucked back into a hot-cold relationship with Lassino, a charismatic pizza chef. The more reserved Bridget is confused by her feelings for two local men who couldn’t be more different. She’s still interested in her fling from the previous summer, Paolo, but finds herself unexpectedly swept off her feet by Lorenzo, who’s both handsome and exceedingly kind. However, her insecurities and fixation on her weight and appearance (especially in comparison to Kit) put her whole love life at risk. In addition to matters of the heart, there’s constant drama unfolding in the apartment thanks to a stream of visitors with problems of their own. Digging into Costa’s frothy narrative is like going on an exotic vacation. Her dynamic duo is funny, frustrating, and entirely relatable. Bridget’s obsession with her Weight Watchers points is alternately amusing and annoying, while Kit’s sunny disposition and desire to please are both endearing and exasperating. The dialogue is timely, quick, and always natural, and the supporting cast of visitors and Positano locals are quirky and occasionally over-the-top; however, Positano’s glistening shores and winding streets take center stage. Costa’s descriptions of food, meanwhile, are positively mouthwatering; she captures the decadence of dining in Italy (“Crisp romaine, garnished with juicy tomatoes and olives...instead of croutons, it was garnished with bits of crispy, chopped-up pizza dough”) and courses with “melon and prosciutto, toasted bruschetta, creamy mushroom risotto,” and more.
Roll out a beach towel and pour a glass of prosecco for this perfect read for a summer getaway.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4834-2324-1
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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