Seemingly alone after the death of her father, Theena bravely faces a frightening world that is often unfriendly to young women just trying to survive in Craig’s historical novel.
The youngest of three girls, Theena (short for Athena) is suddenly adrift when her father passes away. Before his death, he makes Theena promise to marry rich suitor Randolph Chase if asked. Her father knows, even if Theena doesn’t, that 19th-century Florida is not a nurturing place for a woman. Her mother abandoned the family a while ago, and Theena’s father knew his other two daughters (Hera and Dite—the latter short for Aphrodite) wouldn’t wait long to take their leave of the family homestead. Theena does as her father asked, but her heart isn’t in it. She allows herself to believe she’s in love with Randolph because she knows it’s the smart thing to do, but having grown up in South Florida between the Everglades and Atlantic Ocean, she would much rather take her dog fishing than spend the day inside embroidering with a mother-in-law who thinks she’s nothing more than gold-digging trash. The author has a strong, smart heroine in Theena, though she’s not perfect; she doesn’t always make the “right” decision, but her actions make sense for her in the moment, and it’s those decisions that push the story forward. In grief, she shares a night with her best friend, Billy. Against her better judgment, she can’t help being in love with her sister’s husband, Jack. Craig infuses her tale with rich emotion and, by naming the three main characters after Greek goddesses, she’s able to take a shortcut in describing who these women are; Theena is wise and courageous, Hera is jealous by nature and Dite is a cold beauty. This allows the reader to jump right into the plot, and a dizzying plot it is. Some things seem to happen too quickly with the tipping points occurring off the page. For instance, Theena falls into Jack’s bed, even after she swore that she would be faithful to her husband, as well as swearing that she would never hurt her sister that way, leaving the reader confused as to her motivations. However, it’s such a quick, rip-roaring read that these small holes don’t deflate the overall tale. It’s a fun novel filled with rich characters. The backwaters of post-Civil War South Florida could hardly be further apart from ancient Greece, yet Craig infuses her coming-of-age tale with the pathos and heroism one might find in myths, but on an all-too-human scale.
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Gretchen Craig
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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