A well-crafted and heartwarming cross-cultural tale of first love.
In this debut novel, an unconventional romance ignites in Pennsylvania Amish country.
When teenager Rachel Adams, one of the main characters in Patterson’s series opener, moves with her mother from Florida to Paradise, Pennsylvania, in the wake of her father’s death, she’s expecting disappointment and loneliness. Rachel’s mother, Beverly, has purchased a farmhouse in Paradise, and because it requires the extensive attention of an expert handyman, she’s referred to young Paul Fischer, an Amish teenager who comes highly recommended. Rachel is determined to step outside her own resentment of the move. “If there was any hope of contentment, it was up to her to make that happen,” she muses, nevertheless bitterly telling herself that “regardless of the name, this would never be paradise.” For his part, Paul looks on the offer to do work unconnected to his well-meaning family and domineering uncle as an answered prayer even though his upbringing has warned him constantly about the dangers of associating too closely with outsiders. In the standard manner of such love stories, circumstances conspire to bring the two young people together, and romantic chemistry almost immediately develops. In gentle stages, Rachel warms to Paul. “He was amazingly easy to talk to, this Amish man who’d entered her life,” she thinks at one point. “Every encounter she had with Paul made the scales tip in favor of staying in this small town—of even being happy about it.” Patterson captures this slow process with a careful ear for dialogue and a sharp eye for the texture of small-town life. The book indulges in very little of the saccharine idealization that often mars Amish fiction. Instead, the difficulties thrown in the path of true love here feel entirely organic and unforced—including the competition Paul faces for Rachel’s attentions from Kevin Williams, an outsider. The author writes a fairly predictable story with a great deal of heart and conviction; readers should be charmed almost from the first chapter.
A well-crafted and heartwarming cross-cultural tale of first love.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5413-2637-8
Page Count: 291
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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