Fans of romantic beach reads will find that this book’s charismatic heroine makes it an engrossing page-turner.
Almost 20 years after a psychic predicted she would marry a man named Ethan, a woman ready to give up on love meets the man of her dreams in Barnes’ debut novel.
Gina’s childhood friend, Neesha Patel, has a grandmother, Ajee, who’s reputed to have a psychic “gift.” She correctly predicted, for example, that Gina would break her arm and take a trip to Italy and that Neesha would move away from their town before the two girls started high school. “Her predictions came true too many times,” as Neesha puts it—except for one, in which Ajee foresaw that Gina would marry a man named Ethan. Gina, now 36, still hasn’t found this Ethan, and she faces pressure from her aging parents, who think that Ajee ruined her life with her prediction. After a blizzard strands Gina in her car, her serendipitous rescue by a man named Ethan Gregory seems to signal the end of her wait. Then she finds out that Ethan comes with some unexpected baggage, and although she’s desperate to live out Ajee’s prophecy and start a family, she thinks that this man might not be the one that the old woman predicted after all. Barnes’ charming protagonist is likable and relatable and well-supported by her two best friends—co-worker Luci Corrigan Chin and Neesha, whom Gina contacts following Ajee’s death even though the two haven’t spoken in almost 20 years. The author weaves these complex friendships into the narrative, giving extra dimension to what might have otherwise been a flat courtship story. She combines elements of romance and suspense as she slowly unravels Gina’s destiny, throwing in the dashing character of Cooper Allen, Gina’s co-worker, to complicate her relationship with Ethan. The novel’s surprising twist gives the story a satisfying conclusion that makes Gina’s struggle to find Mr. Right worth the wait.
Fans of romantic beach reads will find that this book’s charismatic heroine makes it an engrossing page-turner.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61650-789-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Lyrical Shine
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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