For those focused on lasting emotional connections reached through good conversation, this book is a winner.
A wholesome contemporary romance set in small-town Montana.
Debut novelist Regnery presents a sweet tale of young schoolteacher Jenny Lindstrom; her world is turned upside down the day Sam Kelley walks into her life. Jenny and Sam meet in connection with the unusual wedding of Jenny’s best friend, Ingrid, to Sam’s cousin Kristian, neither of whom is present for their own wedding. Kristian is serving a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and Ingrid is serving at an Army hospital in Germany. Kristian and Ingrid seize on a little-known Montana law that allows couples to marry by proxy, meaning that if the couple finds people to stand in their place and recite marriage vows before a judge, they can be legally married. Enter Jenny and Sam. When Sam arrives for the proxy wedding, he’s so late that the judge has already left for the weekend. Sam is forced to stay in Montana for a few days if he wants to make good on his promise to Kristian. Jenny takes an immediate dislike to Sam’s seemingly pompous behavior, but she also sees there’s something intriguing behind his pretty face. Despite the dressing-down he receives from Jenny, Sam admires her simple beauty and her unaffected manner. After profuse apologies and some teasing banter, Sam wins Jenny over and convinces her to entertain him for the weekend. While bringing these characters to life, Regnery shows each beginning to fall for the other. She also infuses the story with information about Montana’s history and contemporary culture. As Sam begins to surrender to Jenny, he contends with the many obstacles that stand in his way: Jenny’s protective older brothers, his beautiful ex-girlfriend, the local principal who pines after Jenny and the fact that his stay is so brief. A chaste story as far as romances go, this adorable novel will disappoint readers looking for steamy sex scenes. The swift pacing of the narrative, however, and quick wit of the characters provide an undeniable appeal.
For those focused on lasting emotional connections reached through good conversation, this book is a winner.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Boroughs Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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