A provocative, but not picture-perfect, romance novel.
A fragile woman discovers love and lust with her seductive drawing teacher in Gabriel’s (Next to You, 2014, etc.) contemporary romance.
Marie is living apart from her soon-to-be-ex-husband, U.S. Sen. Richard Macintyre. Her best friend, Nishi, gives her drawing lessons for her 30th birthday, and the teacher turns out to be a sexy French artist named Luc Marchand; the lessons take place at Luc’s Colonial-era farmhouse in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Marie’s father, William, a lobbyist and former senator, and Eileen, her fundraiser mother, want Marie to make up with Richard, in spite of his very public relationship with a new lover. Eileen counsels Marie that “Mistresses rarely become wives.” Before Richard left her, she was a dutiful wife and daughter whose life was purposeful and “black and white”—not gray, like it feels to her now. Luc seduces her out of this gray zone and lets her experience color: “Draw blue,” he says. When she doesn’t understand his request, he kisses her and then pushes her away, explaining, “I wanted to turn off your brain, so you could draw.” But was the kiss really just part of a drawing lesson? A subsequent session features a velvet blindfold and Luc urging Marie to touch his naked body. “What does that feel like?” he asks. “Think how that might look on paper.” It’s no shock that they become lovers, but it is a surprise when Richard calls off the divorce. Marie, now in love with Luc, strategizes a way to make Richard reconsider, but neither her plan nor his subsequent actions ring true. Gabriel does depict flirting well, and she paints white-hot sex scenes. Sensual, flawed Luc’s dialogue and internal monologues are also sharp and unpredictable. That said, readers may find it puzzling what a man like Luc would see in milquetoast Marie, even if she is beautiful, with hair that’s a “mélange of red and brown.” Marie also mumbles, slumps, and thinks that “[s]exy French artists were not interested in women like her.” Surely in the 10-plus years that Luc’s been on the market he could have chosen a woman who doesn’t have “more baggage than a 747.”
A provocative, but not picture-perfect, romance novel.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692357422
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Serif Books
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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