A sweet, heartfelt love story that reinforces real-deal values through an intelligent woman and her smoldering beau.
James and Parrish’s debut romance follows a workaholic San Franciscan who finds love in the country.
Catherine “Kitty” Taylor has life figured out, or so she thinks. The marketing firm she took over from her late, beloved father is on the verge of a multimillion-dollar merger, and her lawyer, Nick Dylan, is also her lover. Life in the Bay Area is sweet as can be, with plenty of work, play, and Kitty’s favorite stress reliever, shopping. So what if her potential new partner is both sexist and handsy and Nick keeps pressuring Kitty to move to New York? Meanwhile in Sonoma, Kitty’s mother, Gracie, is busy running a store and renovating the old church that is her home with the help of her adoring boyfriend, Wyatt Dalton, and handsome handyman Daine Shepherd. But when Kitty shows up for Gracie’s birthday party, tragedy strikes. Kitty makes a spontaneous decision to move her business to her mother’s home in Sonoma and finds herself connecting with Daine, who harbors feelings for Kitty but has secrets of his own. Meanwhile, Nick—who isn’t happy with the sudden changes in Kitty and wonders if he should propose—is having an affair with local cafe owner Claire. The plot is standard boy-meets-girl fare, but the predictability is comforting, and the story unfolds naturally in the midst of a lovely, folksy setting. Each character is fully realized, and emotional moments ring true. Though a few of Kitty’s traits are established and never developed—her superstitious nature and lack of body confidence among them—she’s a relatable lead, smart and enterprising. Far from a cardboard love interest, Daine too is multifaceted, facing his own demons of former music superstardom cut short by drug addiction.
A sweet, heartfelt love story that reinforces real-deal values through an intelligent woman and her smoldering beau.Pub Date: April 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9998208-2-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Heartworks Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
None
``When I'm dead, there'll be no stain on our love,'' Garbo tells Armand as her eyes close forever in Camille, and much the same can be said by Justine, the fated vampiress here, as she and her human lover, Keith, go up in a Leibestod of sunlight and darkness. The best vampire fiction seems to have reached the cutting edge of the avant garde, appearing in fearlessly searching prose undreamed of by mainstream writers. Thus in his second novel (after Within Normal Limits, 1987, not reviewed), catching a glimmer from Poppy Z. Brite's Hi-Neon early novels, horror writer Grimson shifts quickly into Electric Purple and, without a qualm, deliquesces at times into deliriously hallucinogenic unpunctuated paragraphs that seek the sensuality of the Beyond. Set in Los Angeles and rife with Hollywood Gothic period detail from the turn of the century forward, the story is densely overpeopled with Vanity Fair types and rock groupies, while its flow of rapid, sharp-edged detail in the history of a star-haunted mansion seems lifted by wax impression from E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. Boyfriend Keith cares for Justine's coffin by day and drives her about by night in search of nourishment. He's a famed but now disabled rock guitarist whose earlier lover, Renata, committed suicide, which moved her wealthy fiance Gilberto to have Keith's fingers crushed by a car door. Back in the 1920s or so, Justine once drank the blood of silent-screen actor David Henry Reid, who was later chained up in a coffin for 20 years in a secret room and now wants revenge on Justine. David's revenge forms the plot here, but it's more like a vein leading into the main artery of Keith's love, melting centuries-old Justine's icy reserve. But too late . . . An erotic confetti-shower that leaves you thrilled and unclean.
None NonePub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-105321-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
The sort of book that puts the shine back on genre as an adjective to describe fiction.
Spartan prose for a Spartan tale of badlands justice set in North Dakota and eastern Montana in the fall of 1951.
Watson’s writing (American Boy, 2011, etc.) is the principal pleasure here. The story is simple, ageless. Margaret Blackledge wants her grandson, Jimmy, back in Dalton, N.D. Daughter-in-law Lorna, her husband dead, has hooked up with the suave Donnie Weboy. Weboys are clannish, violent. Margaret appears prepared to undertake this adventure alone. Her husband, George, former sheriff, strong and silent, not quite the man he used to be, agrees to come. They set off in their old car, period details used sparingly, to wrest from a mother her child, to preserve a family broken by circumstance and hardship, to tempt fate. Grief has marked this fool’s errand from the outset—indelibly. To call the voice that narrates this novel omniscient is accurate only in so far as it describes the fictional convention. We hear an uninflected human voice that knows the outcome of this dark tale and tales like it. No one we meet, and no action taken, is beyond the expected conventions of a bleak American West: “[I]f I never hear again about what’s hard for a man, it’ll be too goddamn soon.”
The sort of book that puts the shine back on genre as an adjective to describe fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-57131-102-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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