by Donielle Ingersoll ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2016
While offering scrumptious recipes, this tale of a baker embracing God’s path to true love lacks a convincing plot.
A wistful and talented dessert maven hopes to find the Christian man of her dreams in this debut faith-based romance.
Patti Murray is known as “Patti Cake” for her superb cake-decorating skills as well as her delicious recipes. Her home business, Exquisite Cakes, is steadily growing in Santa Rosa, California. She’s content in her professional life, but her personal life is lagging. She wants to marry and start a family but feels strongly about marrying a similarly devoted Christian. Patti often talks to God about what she wants in a mate, and hopes that he can deliver someone appropriate to “capture the spirit of true, unending love.” When Patti is least expecting it, not one but two contenders materialize. She literally runs into Dr. Cal Ripland, a local dentist, in several ill-fated episodes. He’s a quiet man but she feels drawn to him. While he weathered a loss when his wife died, he still manages to hang onto his faith. Jim Callahan storms onto the scene with his outsized, film star personality to buy a cake for his sister’s wedding, and attempts to impress Patti with the trappings of his fame. He’s passionate and handsome, but she questions whether he really possesses the personal character she desires. She’s torn between the two men until meditating on her personal beliefs, and their faith, makes it clear who is the right match. Ingersoll’s decadent descriptions of Patti’s cake and pie recipes and the inclusion of full recipes in the appendix help their sweetness jump off the page with mouthwatering detail. But the dialogue is often stilted. Jim’s character becomes trite, with an unnecessary kidnapping and gun battle right out of a Hollywood film. The clunky, repeated phrase “the actor Jim from the movies” appears too often. The ending then rushes into an implausible resolution. While the tale should appeal to Christian romance fans, general audiences will likely find the frequent, page-long conversations with God too slow-paced.
While offering scrumptious recipes, this tale of a baker embracing God’s path to true love lacks a convincing plot.Pub Date: April 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9471-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
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Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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