Intelligent escapism with heart.
A tale of identical twins and not-so-identical islands.
When blue-blooded Boston designer Eleanor Roxie-Frost divorces electrical contractor Billy Frost, the rift consigns their 17-year-old identical twin daughters to separate islands. When they're home from college, Tabitha spends the summers with Eleanor on Nantucket and Harper lives on the Vineyard with Billy, and they visit the opposite parents for holidays. Now the twins are 39 and haven't gotten along in years. For reasons that will remain obscure until the end, Tabitha blames Harper for the death of her premature son, Julian. Neither Tabitha nor Harper has ever married. Tabitha had daughter Ainsley and, later, son Julian out of wedlock with her long-term boyfriend, Wyatt (now married to someone else and effectively out of Ainsley’s life). Tabitha, who has lived her entire adult life in Eleanor’s thrall, occupies her mother’s carriage house and manages the ERF boutique on Nantucket, a stodgy purveyor of preppy resort wear on the verge of going bust. Harper, whose past includes menial jobs and a brush with the law, is now a total pariah on the Vineyard: she'd been having an affair with Billy's doctor, Reed, which is discovered by his wife, Sadie, on the night Billy dies. The fun accelerates when Eleanor, Ainsley (now 16), and Tabitha attend Billy’s memorial service only to have Sadie toss a flute of champagne in Tabitha’s face. Then Eleanor, who could never handle champagne, breaks a hip. For complicated reasons, the twins end up trading islands, with Tabitha heading to the Vineyard to renovate Billy's house and then sell it while Harper goes to Nantucket to look after her niece. Hilderbrand makes the most of the complications caused by twinship and small island worlds: Tabitha’s most recent ex, Ramsay, approaches Harper and decides to pursue this less uptight look-alike, and Tabitha, after some initial difficulties occasioned by Harper’s reputation, falls for master builder Franklin—who is Sadie’s brother. The most poignant scenes feature Ainsley, whose teen angst is quelled by Harper’s nurturing. The romantic relationships seem tacked on to satisfy the demands of the genre, but this beach read doesn’t shy from the grittier side of all that sand.
Intelligent escapism with heart.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-37519-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Sex is easily come by but love proves elusive for the married couples who are members of London's rich, arty set in this thoroughly likable romp from the British Palmer (Scarlet Angel, 1993). ``I don't want the one I've got. I want a different one.'' Tessa Lucas is talking about husbands. ``An upper-crust primitive'' with a will of iron, the beautiful, brainless, sexy Tessa is the engine driving Palmer's novel. She has already slept with half of London and concealed this fact from her jealous, hot-tempered husband, Alexander, who remains unhappily infatuated with her. Then she meets the equally willful, equally promiscuous painter Jack Carey. What could be more chic than being the wife of a famous artist? Her plan greatly alarms her brother James Hartigan. He and Victoria (the only happy couple here) own a gallery, and Jack is their difficult star. They are relying on his long-suffering wife, Ellen, to keep him from drinking and screwing long enough to produce some work for his forthcoming exhibition, and they view Tessa as an intolerable new distraction. Her affair with Jack is the center of the action; on the periphery, poorly integrated into the whole, is another troubled marriage. The unattractive art critic Ginevra Haye married semi-literate builder Kevin because the sex was so good; with Kevin away overseas, Ginevra writes a sexually explicit, wholly imaginary account of a liaison with James (whom she has loved since he deflowered her at Oxford). But writing about women who mope or cope (like Ellen) is not what Palmer does best. She excels at the comic treatment of clashing egos. Sometimes she ratchets up the comedy to the speed of farce: The disastrous Jack Carey private view begins with Tessa replacing a portrait of Ellen with a stunning nude...herself. Though it sometimes feels like a hurried first draft, Palmer's novel has enough attack to make for a consistently lively read.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11326-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
An elaborate story of love, loss and the psychic toll of progress.
A serpentine series of relationships draws four families together as they struggle with the American dream.
Tinged with comedy, tragedy and trials both plausible and not, the story chronicles the disparate lives and fortuitous intermingling of four households representing a wide cross section of the social and economic landscape of 1950s America. Sarah Robbins, a nightclub singer from Ohio, is the most bruised and compelling character. First taken in as a teenaged orphan by the married Judge Kinslow, the old man soon swindles her out of her inheritance and seduces her into a sexual relationship. Left alone and penniless with Kinslow’s son to support, she struggles to rise above her unfortunate circumstances and a powerful addiction to alcohol to raise the boy right. Neil Dvorak, a mournful cabinetmaker, tries to make the best of not one, but two, broken marriages while trying to protect his daughter from the world’s perils. Dolores Drake plans her escape from both Alabama and her husband, a vicious drunk and diehard bigot, and finds her salvation in a black woman named Ruthie Jackson. In California, David and Karen Stratton are the picture-perfect family on the outside, living a life the other characters only see on sitcoms flickering on their black-and-white televisions. But their suburban life has a looming darkness that threatens to come crashing in. Add in all the children, lovers, friends and neighbors and it’s a sea of characters to account for, but Valentine effectively tracks each of them and merges their storylines together. While many of the plotlines veer toward soap opera–and certainly, daytime drama fans will eat this up–the author’s portrayal of both the post-war triumphs and the dismal social failures of an evolving nation make Better Days Ahead a worthy beginning for a promised trilogy.
An elaborate story of love, loss and the psychic toll of progress.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1936
ISBN: 0-9772187-0-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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