A gently affecting tale of personal redemption, second chances, and the power of faith.
A disgraced doctor discovers a path to redemption and a chance at true love while serving a medical mission in this romance.
Thirty-two-year-old Cash Stetson feels like a loser. After a scandal involving the sale of stolen body parts from a hospital morgue, he lost his promising career as an emergency room doctor as well as the woman he loves, Lilly Atkins. The one-time golden boy of Brooks, Oklahoma, fled to Texas, but his sojourn has barely begun when he receives the news that Spencer Locke, the man who won Lilly’s heart, has agreed to represent him in his bid to get his medical license reinstated. Reluctantly, Cash returns to Brooks to face his past. At the hearing, the board is convinced that Cash has met the requirements for reinstatement; however, they also believe that his “heart needs work,” so they require him to spend six weeks volunteering as a medical missionary in Mexico. He travels to a hospital in San Miguel where he meets Texan Maggie Craig, a doctor, and his host, Pepper Wylde. As he settles into his assignment, he draws strength from his patients and Pepper’s wisdom. He also forms a friendship with Maggie, whose personal grief and pain mirror his. When he hits rock bottom, he discovers that his new circumstances are a perfect foundation for a renewal of faith and love. The latest from Lloyd (So Many Boots, So Little Time, 2015, etc.) is a winning contemporary romance that gives a memorable character from her MisAdventures of Miss Lilly series the chance to shine. She shows how Cash deals with the fallout from poor choices, and his relationship with Maggie develops at a gradual pace as he learns to let go of his past and face his future. Cash’s past includes the study of European art history, and the narrative is replete with references to real-life artists, particularly Angelina Beloff, a Russian-born painter who lived and worked in Mexico. Although familiarity with the Miss Lilly series may help readers to better understand the relationships between the characters, this installment offers enough backstory to appeal to newcomers.
A gently affecting tale of personal redemption, second chances, and the power of faith.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-365-25941-8
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Rebelle Press
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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