The plot twists are genuinely surprising, and the complicated relationships give this page-turner a touch of humor and a ton...
On her 40th birthday, a woman uncovers long-buried family secrets connected to the night she got pregnant—and gets a chance to make things right.
It’s not a happy birthday for Harlow, and the tragedies are piled on like icing on a layer cake. Her mother, Vivian Ausby, is on her deathbed. Her ex-husband, Patrick McDade, is the sole benefactor of her mother’s will. Her estranged best friend, Savannah “Van” Pratt, is also in the hospital—and dying of cancer. But a chance reunion with her first love, Jade Ryan, brings up old memories and ignites new feelings. Told in five parts, the story begins in Vivian’s hospital room and flashes back to the night that changed the course of Harlow’s life. At the time, Harlow was a shy 20-year-old with a disapproving mother and an ugly birthmark on her left leg; she didn’t fit in with the upper crust of South of Broad, an exclusive neighborhood in Charleston, South Carolina. If not for her mother’s frosty relationship with Jade’s family, Harlow would have happily chosen easygoing Jade over stuck-up, entitled Patrick. But 20 years later, Harlow is once again single and still pining for the life she should’ve had. It’s easy to see why she’s held a torch for Jade all these years: Now a doting father, Jade even got a tattoo to match his daughter’s unusual birthmark. His relationship with Harlow is as sweet as it is steamy. But Harlow doesn’t know whether he’ll take her back after all this time. Though Van betrayed Harlow years ago, her sassy Southern humor—“A fat ass is the best punishment, and hers busts out like a can of warm biscuits”—makes her easy to forgive. The key to Harlow’s happiness, then, is standing up to her mother and Patrick. But Vivian’s nurse, Beth, has a secret that could overturn everything Harlow thought she knew about her family. The final pages include an excerpt of Rae’s debut, The Achilles Heel (2014).
The plot twists are genuinely surprising, and the complicated relationships give this page-turner a touch of humor and a ton of drama.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9960922-4-1
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Karyn Rae Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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