A friends-to-lovers slow burner that fizzles when the romance hits.
When a guarded real estate analyst and her flirty co-worker find themselves working together to land a lucrative client, they realize their feelings might be more than a simple cubicle crush.
Analyst Cadence Lim is used to taking risks at work, but she's vowed never to risk her heart for top-selling broker and serial bachelor Matt Escanilla. For the five years that Cadence has worked for San Francisco’s Prism Realty, gorgeous Matt has been a welcome reprieve in an office where she is constantly passed over for promotions. His small favors and coffee runs have become a staple of her day, as have the butterflies she feels every time he sticks his head over her cubicle. Much to Cadence's chagrin, her close friendship with Matt has even sparked a flurry of office nicknames for them, including “Asian Jim and Asian Pam” after the characters from The Office. While Cadence would love to ditch her icy exterior and just date Matt, she refuses to invest her heart in a relationship she knows won’t last. Matt is one meeting away from sealing a deal with elusive entrepreneur Percy Ma, and he’s a shoo-in for a promotion to his and Cadence’s hometown of Los Angeles, also known as the land of Cadence’s unresolved family drama. Yet when their boss ensures that a trip to LA to meet Percy can work out well for both of them, Cadence and Matt soon find themselves devoid of any HR restrictions to hold their attraction at bay. Tieu’s second novel, after The Donut Trap (2021), is at its best when the slow burn is still sizzling. Once Matt and Cadence embrace their desires, the passion falls flat and their credibility as best friends feels questionable. Cadence often seems more aggravated than charmed by Matt’s immature behavior, calling him “annoying,” “irritating,” and “a baby” on multiple occasions. Matt’s grating selfishness and Cadence’s constant aversion to friendliness dampen their union, and readers may find it difficult to root for a relationship so fraught with inertia.
A friends-to-lovers slow burner that fizzles when the romance hits.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-306984-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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