A bump-free story of seaside soul connection.
Maria’s debut paranormal romance tells of one woman’s smooth journey from loss to love.
Ever since Marisa Marie Bordeaux-Landon was a baby, she’s had a mystical, sisterly connection with the moon, whom she calls “MoonGlow.” Now Marisa is 42, widowed, and an empty nester, and MoonGlow guides her to buy and restore a supposedly haunted house on the North Carolina coast. There, Marisa submits to MoonGlow’s lover, the ocean (aka “Great Liquid” or “High Tide”), delving into it in order to confront her own fears and explore secrets from her past lives, which he holds in his depths. Marisa’s childhood friend, Caroline Mardas, soon joins her in this ritual, along with new neighbor Terri Roberts. MoonGlow and High Tide help all three women to re-experience events from their past lives so that they may all better understand their present. It later becomes clear that unless Marisa can resolve the “karma” from her past life working at a New Orleans brothel in the 1800s and her marriage to former customer Daniel Ryan, she won’t be able to have a new life with handsome Nathan Rynn. Marisa’s inner monologue, through which most of this tale is told, has an intriguing, lulling quality. However, its odd phrasing can sometimes be confusing: “It was relayed to me that during this time, Daniel had continued on to inform me that he had a made a business deal with Madame.” High Tide, as a character, has an appealing, erotic physicality (“I felt his liquid projections taking hold of me as if I were his prey”) that’s missing in the scenes between Nathan and Marisa (“He kissed me all over. My body surrendered like never before”). Overall, though, this conflict-free journey will roll over readers like waves in the surf.
A bump-free story of seaside soul connection.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4787-8065-6
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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