A funny, frank, and refreshingly mature take on the familiar will-they-or-won’t-they romance template.
A college hockey player finds his vow of celibacy tested when he meets the campus beauty.
This final installment of Kennedy’s (Bad Apple, 2018, etc.) Briar U trilogy focuses on a supporting character from the earlier volumes: hockey star Hunter Davenport. He’s so bitterly disappointed that Briar’s hockey team “didn’t make it to the national championship” that he’s decided to take a vow of sexual abstinence until the end of the season. It’s tough on him (“I take out all my sexual frustration on the ice,” he thinks, but readers won’t believe him). And his pledge doesn’t stop him from appreciating all the lovely women at campus parties. But in a psychology class, he meets smart, gorgeous Demi Davis. Demi immediately notices how handsome he is (“too attractive for his own good”), and soon she and Hunter are paired in a psychology experiment in which she plays the doctor and he the patient. In short order, strong sexual tension builds between the two. Hunter doggedly maintains his “monk” status even as the chemistry between them heats up. Demi admires his stunning looks and is amused by his quick wit (When setting up their next class meeting, he texts her: “Make sure you’re wearing tight spandex pants so I can objectify you”). But she has mixed feelings about Hunter (“He is either the best or the worst. I still haven’t decided”). Kennedy unfolds the story with smooth confidence and a great deal of sure-footed humor. The book’s whole supporting cast is well developed. And both Hunter and Demi are sparkling, enjoyable fictional creations, often unpredictable but also entirely believable, dealing with each other in the sexually frank manner that characterizes notable contemporary romance titles. Hunter’s resolve about his love life feels overdone in the novel’s final third, but the author’s prose is so energetic that only the pickiest readers will find it distractingly unrealistic— in fact, they may love the character all the more for it.
A funny, frank, and refreshingly mature take on the familiar will-they-or-won’t-they romance template.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9995497-6-3
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Elle Kennedy Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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