Flabby, meandering and emotionally vacuous.
Second wife gets short shrift in Buchan’s sequel to Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (2003).
Seven years have passed since Minty stole Nathan, chief exec of a London media firm, from his first wife Rose. She now has everything Rose had—a lively brood (six-year-old twins Lucas and Felix) and Rose’s beloved home and now neglected garden. In Revenge, Rose’s loss of Nathan was immediately followed by the loss of her job at Vistemax, where she was supplanted by her assistant and former confidante, 29-year-old Minty. But marriage to Nathan is far from, er, rosy. Minty has never felt accepted by her husband’s friends. His adult children, Poppy and Sam, alternately manipulate and marginalize her. Poppy racks up Internet poker debt and Minty strives to do damage control before daughter hits Dad up for funds. Sam has a career opportunity in Texas but his wife won’t leave the U.K. Minty, snooping in Nathan’s diary, finds regretful musings. Despite Nathan’s new lease on life, he’s grown taciturn and cranky. Though visibly unwell, he refuses to see a doctor. Meanwhile, he resists Minty’s desire to work full-time at her TV production job. At Vistemax, Nathan’s malaise leaves him open to a palace coup. Rose is annoyingly self-possessed and well-dressed for a dumped, 50-ish ex-wife, and Minty is paranoid about Nathan’s nostalgia for his old life. Nathan drops dead of a heart attack while visiting Rose—he sought her out after being downsized—while Minty is left to sort out her less-than-optimal inheritance and balance her increasingly precarious position at work with single motherhood. Rose keeps cropping up like a sleekly groomed Marley’s ghost. Two girlfriends with marital breakdown and fidelity issues are dropped into the plot, adding little except padding. Weighed down by so much poetic justice, Minty garners no reader identification. Buchan seems mainly intent on continuing Rose’s revenge. Nathan is a cipher and what either woman saw in him remains a mystery.
Flabby, meandering and emotionally vacuous.Pub Date: July 24, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03488-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Empty calories, presented cutely enough.
A family wedding forces a runaway fiancée to stick her toe back in the dating pool.
In this weightless debut, Emmy Everett emerges from seclusion—three years in Rhode Island working in a tackle shop—to return to Scarsdale for older brother Josh’s wedding to graceful Meryl. But Josh isn’t sure he wants to get married this weekend: He might be in love with Elizabeth, a holistic veterinarian with whom he has a connection (it was “like they were hearing the same song”). Urged on all sides to be supportive of her sibling during his crisis of indecision, Emmy can’t avoid contemplating the vacuum in her own love life. Mind you, that could easily be remedied, since suitors dog her every step. There’s Josh’s best friend, sexy chef Jaime; old local boyfriend Justin, although he now reveals himself to be gay; and above all ex-fiancé Matt, last seen sleeping in a motel room next to the abandoned engagement ring as Emmy slipped out the door with the knowledge that “she was losing him slowly anyway.” Dave milks the reliable wedding scenario set pieces, supplementing them with various comic characters, including Meryl’s birth parents, a pair of sociology professors never previously seen outside the Ozarks, and Emmy’s Jewish mother (“Eat just a little”). The book offers a kind of innocent yet worldly-wise charm via Emmy’s perky running commentary, but for every burst of invention, like the power outage that throws the doomed wedding off course, there’s a heaping portion of familiarity, especially in Matt’s prostration before Emmy (“I still have the engagement ring”) and her inevitable conjoining with an even more over-romanticized prospect.
Empty calories, presented cutely enough.Pub Date: May 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03756-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-written women’s weepie from the author of many, now with her first hardcover.
Blindness, babies, bathos.
When photojournalist Jessie Ryder finds that she’s losing her sight to a rare retinal disease, it’s time to take stock—and, at last, meet the child she gave away years before. She rails against her cruel fate as she leaves New Zealand for the Texas town where she grew up. After all, she’d stayed away, kept her distance—and kept her side of the bargain she made with God. She’d provided the best possible home for her newborn by handing her over to her sister Luz and her husband Ian. Even now that she’s a teenager, Lila has no idea that she was adopted (and there’s another thing even Luz doesn’t know). Lila escapes serious injury during a joyriding car accident that shakes the family out of its complacency and forces them to grapple with the Big Questions. Why does Ian, a Death Row lawyer, always have time for his clients but not for his family? Must Luz always shoulder most of the burden of raising the kids and running the house? Luz pines for what she perceives as her sister’s freedom, but Jessie, of course, isn’t really free. She’s always been haunted by what she never told Luz: Lila is the product of a long-ago, whirlwind affair with Ian. Her vision dimming day by day, Jessie wonders whether she’ll ever find happiness. There’s hunky rancher Dusty Matlock, father of an adorable toddler, still fending off media attention ever since his pregnant wife, comatose after a stroke, gave birth by Cesarean and expired a couple of years ago. Should Jessie give in to Blair LaBorde, tabloid reporter, and photograph Dusty? Perhaps. But will Jessie even admit that she’s losing her sight? Yes, once she shares her story yet again at the world-famous center for the blind not far away.
Well-written women’s weepie from the author of many, now with her first hardcover.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55166-673-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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