A triumphant tale of surviving abuse, embracing hockey, and finding love.
A teenage athlete strives to overcome a traumatic past in this debut novel.
Phoebe Rose confronts adolescence having no idea who she is. Found at age 4 wandering around her Ohio neighborhood, she’s been raised in a series of foster homes. Maintaining a sense of normalcy in the wake of such upheaval remains difficult, so Phoebe dedicates herself to hockey from a young age. The game has been there when so many of the adults in her life have failed her. A few of her foster parents have been kind (especially the Wilsons, who she hoped could adopt her but were denied permission because they were black and she was white), but mostly, Phoebe has suffered throughout her childhood. Her last foster father, Mr. Jenkins, an evangelical with a mean streak, beat her repeatedly and raped her. When Phoebe sets off for a Minnesota college with a dream to play on its women’s hockey team, she vows to keep her physical and emotional scars to herself. After Phoebe makes the team, she quickly learns that she no longer needs to “keep surviving”—she can be a whole person again. Slowly opening up to her fellow players, Phoebe not only confesses the ordeals of her past life, but also discovers a safe space within the confines of the team. As time passes, Phoebe’s teammates help her to find both love and peace within herself. Neal’s decision to explore Phoebe’s life in a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards is jarring at first—it takes the reader a while to figure out the timeline. But this strategy turns out to be a brilliant stroke of storytelling—it makes the reader feel as disjointed and uncomfortable as Phoebe does. Neal’s plot covers a lot of ground—Phoebe has been abandoned and mistreated while dealing with a chromosomal disorder and questioning her sexuality. Although this could, quite frankly, feel a bit depressing, Neal’s emotionally gripping narrative anchors Phoebe’s problems and prevents them from drifting too far into weepiness. Though most readers have not shared Phoebe’s trials, all should relate to her struggles—they would do well to absorb her story slowly, savoring both her pain and exultant promise.
A triumphant tale of surviving abuse, embracing hockey, and finding love.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Melancholy Donkey Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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