London (The Scoundrel and the Debutante, 2015, etc.), writing as Jessa McAdams, fashions a light, contemporary romance novel centered on a high-class, stubborn American girl and a down-to-earth, equally stubborn Scottish man.
After her fiancé dumps her less than a month before their planned wedding, Sloane gets into a rut, and her friends are determined to fix her woes. She insists she’s waiting for a man who’s similar to a fictional Scottish rogue from a television program. To that end, she and her friends go on a group trip to Scotland. (Thankfully, her friends only appear for a short time, as all three are overbearing caricatures of rich city girls.) Eager for her friends to stop fixating on her love life, Sloane travels ahead of them, and once in Scotland, she recruits the local bar owner, Galen, to pose as her boyfriend. When Sloane’s friends arrive, she plans for him to publicly break up with her, thus hopefully ending the girls’ busybody interference. In need of the money Sloane promises him, Galen reluctantly agrees to help. Sloane’s character immediately jumps off the page, making it easy for readers to sympathize with her far-fetched scheme. In contrast, Galen’s characterization builds more slowly, which, in combination with his Scottish-accented dialogue, slows the novel’s initial pacing. Despite his original hesitation, Galen finds himself falling for Sloane, and in a predictable twist, Sloane, used to playing it safe, finds herself throwing caution to the wind with Galen. As the narrative progresses, the pacing picks up and the dialogue between the two grows white-hot, charged with relatable wit and humor. Their seemingly perfect relationship takes a turn, though, when Sloane’s friends finally arrive, along with an unsuspected surprise—reminding Sloane and Galen of the contractual, and supposedly artificial, nature of their relationship.
Despite a rocky start and some underdeveloped secondary characters, this is a quick, entertaining beach read packed with delightful dialogue and plenty of laughs.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 179
Publisher: Entangled Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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Despite some distractions, there’s an irresistible charm to Owens’ first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.
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A wild child’s isolated, dirt-poor upbringing in a Southern coastal wilderness fails to shield her from heartbreak or an accusation of murder.
“The Marsh Girl,” “swamp trash”—Catherine “Kya” Clark is a figure of mystery and prejudice in the remote North Carolina coastal community of Barkley Cove in the 1950s and '60s. Abandoned by a mother no longer able to endure her drunken husband’s beatings and then by her four siblings, Kya grows up in the careless, sometimes-savage company of her father, who eventually disappears, too. Alone, virtually or actually, from age 6, Kya learns both to be self-sufficient and to find solace and company in her fertile natural surroundings. Owens (Secrets of the Savanna, 2006, etc.), the accomplished co-author of several nonfiction books on wildlife, is at her best reflecting Kya’s fascination with the birds, insects, dappled light, and shifting tides of the marshes. The girl’s collections of shells and feathers, her communion with the gulls, her exploration of the wetlands are evoked in lyrical phrasing which only occasionally tips into excess. But as the child turns teenager and is befriended by local boy Tate Walker, who teaches her to read, the novel settles into a less magical, more predictable pattern. Interspersed with Kya’s coming-of-age is the 1969 murder investigation arising from the discovery of a man’s body in the marsh. The victim is Chase Andrews, “star quarterback and town hot shot,” who was once Kya’s lover. In the eyes of a pair of semicomic local police officers, Kya will eventually become the chief suspect and must stand trial. By now the novel’s weaknesses have become apparent: the monochromatic characterization (good boy Tate, bad boy Chase) and implausibilities (Kya evolves into a polymath—a published writer, artist, and poet), yet the closing twist is perhaps its most memorable oddity.
Despite some distractions, there’s an irresistible charm to Owens’ first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1909-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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