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
Another of Rae's light chillers (The Hidden Cove, 1995, etc.) set in a turn-of-the-century Manhattan of gilded turrets and grimy tenements: a tale of both staid and messy romances featuring ladies naughty and nice—and a doomed man with a sad secret. In 1892, it seemed to 17-year-old Caroline that everyone was moving uptown, and so when Papa became rich, the Slade family of two boys and two girls followed the migration, moving into a grand mansion in the East 60s. What Caroline won't know, however, until after the accidental deaths, in that same year, of her parents and a brother, is that the neighboring twin mansion—where she had made the acquaintance of elderly Henrietta Prentice—harbors secrets that eerily connect it to the Slade family. Now, Caroline, beautiful social butterfly Laurel, and brother Brad find themselves penniless as well as orphaned. It is Miss Prentice who insists Caroline and Brad live temporarily in her home, while Laurel is off on a hopeful whirl among the wealthy. With Miss Prentice is her great-nephew Leland, a seemingly pleasant, attractive novelist. But why does Miss Prentice tell Caroline he must never marry? What explains his abrupt changes of moods, and his sudden departures both from Manhattan and from Miss Prentice's home in Newport? Brad and Caroline eventually settle happily into careers and marriages, but Laurel, now a social outcast, thanks to vicious rumors, sees a haven in wealthy Leland—with disastrous results. Before the (inevitable) cleansing fire, there are flights and terrors, and, at the close, revelations concerning Leland's deadly malaise. The author is a sure hand with gothic tremors (``Terror such as I had never known gripped me'') and the taboos of the Gilded Age, though some may be bothered by the depiction of Leland's illness. Still, Rae is as firmly in her Manhattan-past niche as Stephen Birmingham.
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-17039-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
One thinks of Grand Hotel, or perhaps Terence Rattigan’s popular play Separate Tables, while reading this entertaining Israeli novel, which joins in English translation its acclaimed author’s earlier Musical Moment and The Way to the Cats. The story’s set in and near a Tel Aviv apartment complex, whose various inhabitants—including a shy virgin warily contemplating adultery, a wrathful conservative religious zealot, and a family shamed when its soldier son goes AWOL from the Israeli army, among others—are gradually shown to be “connected” in ways that illuminate both their individual priorities and their communal identity. Beautifully structured, and an eye-opening composite portrayal of a culture whose complexities we barely comprehend.
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58642-013-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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