Talky, tear-jerking thriller from screenwriter/novelist Briley (The Traitors, 1969, etc.). Would you believe a blond, blue-eyed Jewish-American beauty who meets, captivates, and weds a Saudi Arabian princeling on orders from Israeli intelligence? That this brainy, worldly young woman remains tucked away in a desert harem for almost two decades before she's called upon to serve the murky cause of her masters in Tel Aviv? That the long-married lady genuinely regrets betraying her handsome husband? Then Briley has a book for you. At the behest of Mossad, Lisa Cooper contrives to run into Le'ith Safadi while both are students at UCLA during the late 1970s. The dashing young MBA candidate (whose given name means young lion) is soon besotted and, against the urgent advice of his US minders, he takes her to wife. While not of the royal house, the Safadis wield considerable influence within the oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Although the unblushing bride eventually wins over the senior members of Le'ith's extended family, she doesn't fool her villainous, ambitious brother-in-law Rashid, who suspects her from the start. Meanwhile, the ever volatile Middle East is convulsed by events ranging from Israel's invasion of Lebanon through the Gulf War. At length, after the Jewish State and the PLO take their first tentative steps toward peace, Lisa is called upon to sell out Le'ith (who's negotiating with his traditional enemies to join forces in an economic development project that could benefit the whole region). One fine day in Cairo, she betrays him, albeit with a heavy heart. Barely escaping the ensuing violence with her own life. Lisa learns (after arriving in Israel) that Le'ith has survived as well. At this point, the in-from-the-cold agent realizes she truly loves her no longer young lion and returns to Saudi Arabia for a dramatically implausible reunion. Danielle Steel meets Robert Ludlum without any particularly gainful result.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-15235-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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