An engaging second-chance romance.
A job interview leads to an unexpected offer—and a potential lover—for a widow reinventing her life and career in this debut novel.
Alesandra “Andie” Halzer is devastated when her husband of 25 years, Nick, dies unexpectedly following routine surgery. Two years later, Andie interviews for the position of director of special projects for Johnathan “Jack” Devlan’s company, Devcor Diversified, Inc. Jack is impressed with her credentials, expertise, and strong work ethic. Although Jack selects another candidate for the position, he has a different job in mind for Andie. Jack wishes to pursue new business opportunities, but he does not want the attention of eligible women to interfere with that goal. He needs someone to pose as his date at various social events, and Andie is his ideal candidate for the role. Intrigued but cautious, Andie agrees to Jack’s terms, including the stipulation that neither becomes emotionally attached. Over the course of three months, Andie accompanies Jack to award luncheons, wine tastings, and dinner parties. What starts as a business arrangement soon turns personal when Jack discovers he has fallen in love with Andie. With time running out on the contract, Jack begins a campaign to convince Andie to stay in his life forever. Capen’s book is a fresh and sharply written contemporary romance featuring dynamic characters and a unique and surprisingly tender love story at its center. Andie is an appealing heroine whose concerns about re-entering the workforce after her husband’s death are relatable. In a well-drawn scene, she confronts her fears about interviewing for the position with Jack’s company (“What was I thinking? I’m too old for this job. But how do they expect someone to have all that experience without being at least thirty-five or forty”). Jack is a hard-driving businessman who has avoided emotional entanglements since the death of his wife, Maggie. Although Andie and Jack’s relationship begins as a contractual arrangement, a loving connection gradually develops, grounded in part by their shared grief over the deaths of their spouses. That said, there is an inconsistency in the rendering of Jack’s first name. It is spelled “Johnathan” and “Jonathan.”
An engaging second-chance romance.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-885297-03-7
Page Count: 377
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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