Colgan has a wide fan base who find her light novels as warm and delicious as the sweets in her books. Her latest, though,...
Plucky Polly Waterford wants a simple life of baking treats at the Little Beach Street Bakery and cozying up her home, a run-down lighthouse she shares with a beekeeper boyfriend and pet puffin.
Colgan (Little Beach Street Bakery, 2015, etc.) offers her latest literary confection, the tale of Polly, whose plan to buy the quaint Little Beach Street Bakery is derailed when its current owner dies. This leaves room for greedy, meddling heirs who put profits above pastries, forcing Polly to grapple with how to maintain both her job and her integrity. She never has to make that choice, though, as she's fired after showing up for work covered in puffin vomit. (Shockingly, the new boss isn’t a fan of Polly’s puffin, who regularly visits the bakery.) With the help of her hunky beau, Polly ventures out on her own with a mobile bakery. Reading more like a romantic-comedy movie script than a novel, this formulaic tale has all the requisite elements of a boppy chick flick. There’s the forced merriment of the pub scene where a cast of tipsy friends laughs at their own sloshy jokes. There’s the daffy part when Polly bargains with the bumbling owner of “Nan the Van.” (She offers more money than he wants…crazy, right?) And there’s that time when Polly and her ex-boyfriend’s widow dance together while baking. While there’s no shortage of quirkiness, the missing ingredient in this novel is plot. Polly simply goes through her paces and gives readers little reason to turn pages and root for her.
Colgan has a wide fan base who find her light novels as warm and delicious as the sweets in her books. Her latest, though, is half-baked.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-237124-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A hard-cover debut from McNaught (sudsers like Almost Heaven and Kingdom of Dreams) links—in a contentious, sizzling-sheets romance—a Chicago department-store heiress/exec and a self-made corporate king. Between the first pash and the final nuptial flight, there're pages and pages of buzz about business and betrayals. Meredith Bancroft, only offspring of the ruthless president of Bancroft & Co., had pushed romance aside—all she wanted at 18 was to fill her father's male-chauvinist trotter-prints to head Bancroft. Then entered Matt Farrell, a lowly mechanic from rural Indiana: ``His features looked as if they had been chiselled out of rough granite.'' Meredith (with ``a nose that sculptors would envy'') was a mere pebble of fate, and there followed a volcanic coupling, a pregnancy, and marriage. But, alas, Meredith, back with furious Daddy, suffered a miscarriage...then waited in vain for Matt—who believed she'd had an abortion and who wanted a divorce. Eleven years later, Matt, having risen to heights at which he's interviewed by Barbara Walters and ``emanates raw, harsh power,'' and Meredith, still held from power by Dad, clash. There's a nasty surprise about the long-ago divorce, and Matt makes some surprising demands. Will they never blurt out their separate versions of what happened 11 years before? Yes, but as romance-readers know, that takes time—here filled with stony silences, the biting of lips, and awesome lapses into Love. There's also a good deal of corporate takeover talk (nothing strenuous), fancy clothes, food, and digs. If not absolute paradise for McNaught fans, at least a sunny easement to the beach—where this will be an inevitable summer companion. (Book-of-the-Month Dual Selection for August.)
Pub Date: July 8, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-60129-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
A fascinating novel that aptly balances disastrous circumstances and healing romance.
A young woman trying to keep her siblings together in their California home contends with a series of natural disasters and is thankful for help from a chivalrous Public Works supervisor who tempts her to relinquish some of her control.
Two years after her parents died in an accident, Parker Sinclair is fighting to keep her family’s home and make sure her younger sister stays in college and her brother finishes high school. She's not prepared to deal with a Santa Clarita Valley wildfire in her backyard. While the house barely survives, the forest around them is destroyed, leaving them vulnerable to mudslides. Enter Colin Hudson, a recently promoted supervisor in the LA County Public Works Department, who oversees an enormous, monthslong project engineered to channel water around existing homes. Colin and his crew create a command post on Parker’s property, and he comes to admire her tenacity and intelligence. The two inch into a relationship, but his protective nature clashes with her independence and need to control her environment as much as possible. Yet when the Sinclair home is threatened again by unrelenting rain, Colin and his family offer Parker and her siblings a circle of people they can trust and lean on. Author Bybee (Faking Forever, 2019, etc.) draws on her own dramatic experience with fires and mudslides to create a satisfying love story between two people who would never have met if not for disaster. The personal romantic conflicts are slightly weak, but the sheer force of Mother Nature’s meddling makes for fascinating reading, and the gradual weaving together of Colin’s and Parker’s families, along with an emotionally wounded tenant—whose attraction to Colin’s brother sets up a second book in the series, presumably—gives additional emotional weight and texture to the story.
A fascinating novel that aptly balances disastrous circumstances and healing romance.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0980-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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