An appealing love story that’s both sentimental and down-to-earth.
A businessman who’s sworn off love searches for the woman he’s literally been dreaming about in this debut novel.
Canadian Joe Riley, 37, has spent nearly two decades avoiding serious relationships. The workaholic, with his own private wealth management practice, prefers going on solitary hikes and living alone. Then a strange woman monopolizes his dreams. These are more than lucid dreams; Joe sees through her eyes and feels what she does. When awake, he can’t get her out of his mind, completely derailing his busy routine. Advice from a psychologist and even a medium only convinces him that the woman of his dreams is real. So he learns all he can about her: She’s Claire, a divorced Englishwoman with three kids and a cheating ex. After making the unprecedented decision to take a California vacation, Joe suddenly changes his mind—and his destination. Surely, it can’t be that hard to find a newspaper writer named Claire in Britain. He scours bylines and makes phone calls once in London, but what will he say if they’re face to face? While explaining what led him to her is one thing, there’s the possibility that Joe is already in love. Morrison delivers a grounded, absorbing romantic tale. Ample discussions of love do sometimes spin off into clichés, which are no less formulaic with characters continually acknowledging them. (“ ‘I know this sounds utterly cliché, if not painfully cheesy, but I feel like I’ve known you longer than these few weeks,’ Claire said.”) Nevertheless, the author offers a refreshingly realistic narrative approach. Both Joe and Claire, for example, willingly succumb to romance while plagued with endless doubts that such a relationship can last. Two people fearing the prospect of love does make for a heart-rending story, especially in the latter half. But humorous details provide relief, such as Joe naming his inner voices (for instance, perpetually cynical Roger). Morrison moreover sets his novel in the late 1990s, sparking such memorable scenes as Joe trying out this thing called the “World Wide Web.”
An appealing love story that’s both sentimental and down-to-earth.Pub Date: May 22, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 407
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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