A satisfying romance with well-drawn characters.
A devastating car accident forces a happily married couple to confront a new reality in this novel.
When Serena Irving met Oliver Wolfe at a firemen’s carnival in St. Caroline, a small town on the eastern shore of Maryland, their attraction was immediate. After a whirlwind romance, the Princeton-educated daughter of a wealthy New York family married the firefighter and settled in St. Caroline despite her parents’ objections. Eight years later, Serena and Oliver have two sons, Mason and Cam, and she is pregnant again when a car accident leaves her in a coma for four months. When she wakes, Oliver is surprised to discover Serena has no memory of the past seven years. After physical therapy, she returns to a house she does not recognize and tries to adjust to life as the mother of two young sons. She finds support from her best friend, Ashley Wardman, a photographer coping with the recent death of her husband, Ben. Oliver, reeling from the death of his mother, Angie, tries to help; but he senses something is different about his wife. As her memories return, Serena discovers she has a talent for teaching. When a letter arrives for Serena from an attorney representing Ben, Oliver suspects that his wife may have had a secret life. This fourth installment of Gabriel’s (Hearts on Fire, 2017, etc.) St. Caroline series is an appealing contemporary romance and an affecting portrait of a family recovering after a shattering tragedy. The story opens with Serena emerging from her coma. The author deftly establishes the history of Serena and Oliver’s relationship through flashbacks and their memories. The two are winsome protagonists whose romance endures despite her parents’ belief that the couple would “split up within the year.” While Oliver’s suspicions about his wife seem overblown, the subplot does allow the author to effectively explore the firefighter’s fears that the life he can offer Serena in St. Caroline cannot compete with her privileged upbringing. Readers of the series will recognize characters from the previous installments, including Becca Trevor and Jack Wolfe as well as other members of their extended families.
A satisfying romance with well-drawn characters.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9996548-9-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Serif Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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