With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer.
Whitehead’s justly celebrated Harlem Trilogy comes to a triumphant, satisfying conclusion.
The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner has brought his decades-long saga of furniture retailer and part-time criminal fence Ray Carney into the 1980s, a time of starkly mixed blessings for a New York City galvanized by reckless real estate development, plagued with widespread homelessness, and immersed in crime and corruption of gaudy proportions. As with its two predecessors, Harlem Shuffle (2021) and Crook Manifesto (2023), this installment carves its historic period into three self-contained but interwoven stories set in three different years. The first takes place in 1981, when Ray, flush with pride over being named Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” is confounded when wife Elizabeth is denied a loan for her travel business. So, to get her the money she needs, he joins a crew led by the redoubtable Uncle Rich, a legendary thief, embarking on a near-impossible heist at the Waldorf Astoria. Elizabeth also spearheads the second installment, which takes place two years later, when she recruits the dyspeptic Pepper, Ray’s friend and sometime coconspirator, as bodyguard for a jittery art dealer carrying a valuable African mask. When that object goes missing, Pepper and a hip young woman bearing a mohawk haircut and combat boots wander the seedier streets of Manhattan to locate it, crossing paths with a “Melancholy Hitman” also frantically pursuing the mask and leaving mutilated corpses in his wake. In the final section, taking place in 1986, Ray struggles to fulfill a posthumous obligation to his ill-fated cousin, Freddie, by using all his hard-earned wiles as salesman and felon to save Freddie’s son, Robert, from being framed (or worse) in the murder of a bent Queens lawyer. It’s as improbable as packing three page-turning thrillers into one book that’s sustained throughout by rich, engaging characterizations and lucid, provocative reflections on a community, a city, and a people it presents as both exasperating and captivating with equal intensity.
A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550505
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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