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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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