Amiable—with some useful advice for meeting men—but predictable.
Can a marketing strategy help a 37-year-old Londoner find love the second time around?
Ally James works in marmalade. Perhaps not as exciting as her previous job at Chanel, but given the shorter hours and higher pay, she’s willing to exchange a bit of glamour for more time with her two young children, Millie and Jack. Since divorcing David, a dashing photographer who loves women a bit too much, Ally has led a slightly hum-drum existence—her idea of a special night is nachos with tuna fish accompanied by another viewing of Sleepless in Seattle. All this changes when, as a favor for best friend Mel, Ally attends a series of relationship seminars held by Marian Boyd, who promises that applying marketing schemes to dating will lead to wedded bliss. Mel works for a women’s magazine and needs Ally as an undercover participant, but really, Mel thinks it’s not a bad way to get Ally out of her rut. After following the dictums of the seminar (and getting a make-over), Ally lassos in three “Duck Decoys.” These Ducks are to be men Ally has no real interest in (or are unsuitable in some way) but can be both good practice material and morale boosters. There’s Alan, a fireplace salesman who is kind but frumpy, electrician Gary and Tom, who doesn’t seem like a Decoy at all. Tom is charming, sweet and dotes on his three-year-old, Grace, but may be too recently widowed to consider a relationship. Ally lures him in anyway, and sparks fly, but someone else has entered the picture: David, repentant and ready to come back to his family. Should Ally take back the father of her children? What about Tom? Can telemarketing and direct-mail campaigns work for love? Maybe, but Buxton’s tale is too familiar to distinguish it from the genre it’s part of.
Amiable—with some useful advice for meeting men—but predictable.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-48646-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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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