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
A sassy, sexy Southwestern romance.
A fun, sexy novel about middle-aged romance, second chances and the wide open spaces of big-hearted Texas.
Ann, a high-powered bicoastal business woman on the verge of marrying a high-powered dud, takes her fiancé and her two children, Daniel and Stella, to the Double-D ranch, a getaway for weekend wranglers. For Ann, worried about the impending demise of an adventurous love life and the happiness of her children, it’s a romantic litmus. Her thriller-writer beau is withdrawn and hardly musters the effort to look at her when she speaks–he’s also no hearty father figure. Enter Thunder, a studly cowpoke resembling the second coming of the Marlboro Man. He’s handsome, friendly and great with the kids–as hard as they fall for Thunder on the trail rides, Ann goes stirrups over saddle. Impetuously deciding to leave her fiancé, purchase a ranch on the cheap, bring the children and shack up with Thunder, Ann barely has time to catch her breath before realizing she may have corralled her life into dangerous territory. Initially blissful, the trials and tribulations of ranch life and a small business take their toll on the relationship, and it’s a long and winding trail toward contentment. The first-person narration is smart and sassy, but the plot occasionally meanders and edits could spur things along. Thunder is great candy for the mind’s eye and all the characters are surprisingly developed within the Harlequin-esque setup. The romance is thrilling, but the book cools during the obligatory erotic interludes–there is plenty of heat, but the fire seems to be missing. The fate of Ann and Thunder is rendered in a supremely mature conclusion, but the final resolution is rushed, as though the novel were exhausted from its own conflicts. Still, the attitude and believable heroine make the book a hoot.
A sassy, sexy Southwestern romance.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-2525-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A literary feast.
Enormously impressive first fiction from poet and blacksmith Villasenor, who traces the trajectory of a despondent philosopher from the nuthouse to a place he can finally call home.
To reach that place, however, Zachary Brannagan first must bring tragedy into the lives of those who care most about him. Though he was once a promising young scholar, Zach's cloistered, studious life has been in ruins since the night he lay down to sleep in the middle of a road outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Institutionalized, he befriends an elderly psychiatrist, who loans him the money to travel in search of his natural parents, somewhere on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. But ill fortune strikes Zach in New Orleans: his money stolen, he lives on the street until taken to a Catholic shelter, where on his first night he's assaulted and sliced with a razor. Fleeing blindly, he finds his way by chance to The Lake, a backwoods haven for maimed and afflicted children run by the supremely capable Anna, who seems to need nothing other than the company of her charges. At this refuge Zach begins to heal physically and spiritually, in the process making friends with the shelter's most special child, Samuel, a redheaded epileptic who doesn't speak but nonetheless communicates eloquently. Though he's grown close to Anna as well, Zach tears himself away to resume his journey, taking Samuel with him. They find disaster on the road soon enough, and the shock of it brings Zach at last to an understanding of what truly matters. As the story unfolds, this already engrossing drama of sadness and redemption is elevated to an even higher level by the author's poetic sensibility, which conveys to the most ordinary things a rare luster and warmth that recast the whole of reality in the shimmering, singing colors of a rainbow.
A literary feast.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89161-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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