A dark, bewitching twist on a classic story.
After her mother dies, a young woman discovers that her stepfather has a secret agenda in the latest installment of Regnery’s (Catching Irish, 2018, etc.) Modern Fairytale series.
Ashley Ellis always had a complicated relationship with her mother, Tig, a supermodel whose career ended due to drug abuse. Through it all, Ashley received support from her godfather, Gus. Shortly after Ashley turns 18, tragedy strikes when Tig dies of a drug overdose. Ashley’s shock turns to fear when her stepfather, Mosier Raumann, the head of a violent crime family, tells her that he plans to marry her—after she graduates from high school. She turns to Gus and his partner, Jock, for help. They send her to Jock’s country house, where she meets their tenant, Julian Ducharmes, a former Secret Service agent who now works as a glassblower. Although he’s initially wary of Ashley, he’s unable to deny his attraction to her, and their cautious friendship soon turns into a passionate romance. While Ashley searches her mother’s diary for clues to her life and death, Gus, Jock, and Julian try to protect her from Mosier and his sons, Anders and Damon. Mosier, however, is determined to find Ashley and make her his wife, and he’ll stop at nothing to achieve his goal. Regnery’s latest series installment offers a contemporary twist on “Cinderella” with dynamic characters and a well-developed romance at its heart. The narrative is anchored by Ashley, who’s shown to be a gentle, devoutly religious young woman whose relationship with her mother was fraught with instability, and the author does a fine job outlining their complex history. Regnery also fully sketches out Julian as he struggles to deal with an error in judgment that ended his Secret Service career. Ashley’s romance with him develops slowly, bolstered by scenes that crackle with erotic tension. The fast-paced chapters alternate between Ashley’s and Julian’s first-person points of view and Tig’s journal entries, providing readers with insight into each character and their motivations.
A dark, bewitching twist on a classic story.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944810-37-5
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
