An enjoyable, family-focused contemporary romance and a satisfying continuation of the series.
The relationship between an architect and an attorney is tested by a court case and painful secrets from the past.
Skye Mallory enjoys a successful law practice in her hometown of Darling Cove, a hamlet on the North Fork of Long Island. A case involving her police officer father, Martin, is challenging, but she’ll help him any way she can. When her former boyfriend, musician Miles Benjamin, asks for her legal services in his dispute with a builder, she reluctantly agrees because she could use the money. Edward Mendelsohn, an architect and fire chief of the Darling Cove Volunteer Fire Department, is attracted to Skye, but he’s worried about making the first move. A single father to Julian, a 7-year-old boy, he hasn’t been in a relationship since Julian’s mother, Lauren, left three years earlier. After Edward rescues Skye from a fire at her home, they begin dating and discover a connection that is as immediate as it is passionate. But a legal conflict of interest and a surprise visitor from Edward’s past could potentially derail their chance for true and lasting love. The third installment of Garland’s (Must Have Faith, 2018, etc.) Darling Cove series successfully builds on characters and storylines introduced in the first two novels while maintaining the focus on the connection between Skye and Edward. Initially introduced as a supporting character in Must Love Fashion (2017), Skye emerges as a strong protagonist who must balance her ethical and legal duties to Miles with her desire to follow her heart and pursue a future with Edward. Her bond with Edward develops quickly, bolstered by scenes that are both tender and playful. A subplot involving a health crisis Skye experienced after graduating from law school is sensitively handled. Lead characters from the first two novels, including Gwendolyn Mallory and Faith Copeland, continue to play active roles in the series.
An enjoyable, family-focused contemporary romance and a satisfying continuation of the series.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72905-472-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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