A richly textured portrait of people repairing their damaged lives, full of sly wit, plangent emotion, and suppressed...
An older woman’s past rejection of love and family leads her to contemplate suicide but also seek out second chances in Dahman’s serio-comic romance.
CJ Nettles is a retired schoolteacher given to prickly rants (as a girl, she enraged her pastor by challenging his creationist lectures with evolutionary theory) who lives in the town of Fremont, Indiana. She’s had a mostly unsuccessful love life, as exemplified by her first teenaged kiss with schoolmate Alfred Shively, which proved so disappointing that she whacked him with a tree branch—an incident that passed into local legend as Shively’s Kiss. Alone and feeling like she has nothing to live for, CJ decides to kill herself by driving off a cliff; when she survives the crash, things take an unexpectedly hopeful turn. Her best friend Lydia rallies around her at the hospital, the recently divorced Alfred tries to rekindle their love, and sympathetic shrink Esmeralda Alvarado gets her into therapy to unearth two buried traumas. The first was a tragic car accident in which CJ’s mom, momentarily distracted by her young daughter, accidentally ran over a little boy. The second was a love affair between the 24-year-old CJ and her 19-year-old former student David Vaccaro, which ended when CJ became pregnant, ghosted him in a panic, and later gave their infant daughter up for adoption; prodded by her judgmental grandmother, CJ then falsely told the sheriff that David had coerced her into sex and had him run out of town. Having confronted her demons, CJ starts rebuilding a life with Alfred, symbolized by their renovation of her family cottage. But more challenges roil her life, including a bullying developer with a project that could pollute the lake, a contractor who assaults her, and a fraught reconnection with David and their long-lost daughter.
Dahman’s yarn vividly evokes a small-town community where everyone knows everyone else’s business—and gossips about it—and relationships play out in life-long arcs of intimate knowledge, resentment, forgiveness, and love. The characters are flawed but vibrant: CJ secretly yearns for connection despite her stiff, arms-length approach to the world, while Alfred is an underachiever with a warm wit and a heart of gold beneath his knee-jerk coping mechanism of self-deprecation. The author explores the characters in prose that reveals psychology and mood in subtle, evocative detail: “He simply started to eat—vacuum—the slurry with the huge wooden spoon he used to stir the processed concoction,” Dahman writes of Alfred’s post-divorce rut. “This caused him to look like a small child eating with a utensil he could hardly maneuver.” Dahman can also write enthralling scenes of shocking violence: “She grabbed his thick muscled arm in a feeble attempt to stop him from using the hammer on her face. His forearm felt like a woven steel cable, but she had adrenaline on her side and it bought her a few precious seconds.” The author makes these seemingly quiet, thwarted lives thrum with engrossing drama.
A richly textured portrait of people repairing their damaged lives, full of sly wit, plangent emotion, and suppressed passion.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.
A vampire and an Alpha werewolf enter into a marriage of convenience in order to ease tensions between their species.
As the only daughter of a prominent Vampyre councilman, Misery Lark has grown accustomed to playing the role that’s demanded of her—and now, her father is ordering her to be part of yet another truce agreement. In an effort to maintain goodwill between the Vampyres and their longtime nemeses the Weres, Misery must wed their Alpha, Lowe Moreland. But it turns out that Misery has her own motivations for agreeing to this political marriage, including finding answers about what happened to her best friend, who went missing after setting up a meeting in Were territory. Isolated from her kind and surrounded on all sides by the enemy after the wedding, Misery refuses to let herself forget about her real mission. It doesn’t matter that Lowe is one of the most confounding and intense people she’s ever met, or that the connection building between them doesn’t feel like one born entirely of convenience. There’s also the possibility that Lowe may already have a Were mate of his own, but in spite of their biological differences, they may turn out to be the missing piece in each other’s lives. While this is Hazelwood’s first paranormal romance, and the book does lean on some hallmark tropes of the genre, the contemporary setting lends itself to the author’s trademark humor and makes the political plot more easily digestible. Misery and Lowe’s slow-burn romance is appealing enough that readers will readily devour every moment between them and hunger to return to them whenever the story diverts from their scenes together.
Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593550403
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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