This talky love story will turn the most romantic reader into a curmudgeon.
In Saul’s second novel (Light of Day, 2005), a 40-ish man faces the lack of passion in his life when he becomes the executor of a college friend’s estate.
Geoffrey lives in Manhattan where he earns a living doing voice-overs and carries on a no-strings relationship with his girlfriend. One day he gets a call from a lawyer; his old friend Laura has died and he’s been named executor of her small estate. When Geoffrey knew Laura, he was at Columbia and she was at Juilliard. She moved to Paris with her husband, fellow jazz musician Steve, but when he died nine years ago, she moved back to her upstate New York hometown and taught music. Geoffrey drives up there and soon meets her best friend Marian, who also happens to be a widow. Narrator Geoffrey announces on the second page that he has fallen in love with Marian at first sight. The only problem is that Marian has a boyfriend she doesn’t even pretend she loves. Eliot runs the local hardware store and doesn’t like to discuss feelings (readers will sympathize after hundreds of pages of Geoffrey’s navel gazing). Marian uses their relationship to avoid feeling the kind of passion she had with her husband Buddy. Instead, since Buddy’s death, she has been clinging to his memory and her grief. She and Laura bonded as “the young widows.” It is less clear why Geoffrey has avoided emotional commitment, although he and his gay psychiatrist brother Alex certainly discuss their avoidance enough—at least until Alex meets and falls immediately in love with Laura’s wayward brother Simon, whom Laura and Geoffrey conspired to keep from attending her wedding long ago. By then Geoffrey and Marian are talking nonstop about their emotions. For a guy who claims to be out of touch with his capacity for feelings, Geoffrey is the most touchy-feeling fictional hero since Oliver Barrett IV, the main character in Erich Segal’s bestseller Love Story.
This talky love story will turn the most romantic reader into a curmudgeon.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-144972-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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