McKinnon (a pseudonym for a ``respected literary novelist'') baldly attempts to grab Bridges of Madison County's audience with this tale of a divorced woman's encounter with the handsome son of her first love. Maggie McIntyre never meant to get divorced, and she never meant to return to the Harvest Moon, the dance hall where she'd worked summers during college and fallen in love for the first, and possibly the only, time. But when she turns up a pack of love letters from her old heartthrob, Robbie Flaubert, his words bring back a flood of memories of the grand house by the lake in Ontario, where she waited tables before running off with him to the forest to make love. Realizing that the Harvest Moon was the only place she'd ever been happy, 47-year-old Maggie leaves Kansas City to try to recapture that happiness—hoping to find Robbie still there. Instead, she finds the Harvest Moon boarded up and for sale, her once-best friend, Claire Findley, back in town after a series of divorces, and her beloved Robbie dead of a heart attack after having married locally and fathered a son. Still, Maggie is so enchanted by the area that she decides to buy the old dance hall herself, refurbish it, and begin a new life. She advertises for a handyman, hardly suspecting that Robbie's son will volunteer—and that he'll be as handsome, sexy, and admirably independent as Robbie himself. Is Maggie's attraction to this younger man real, or just a morbid fascination? Can one fall in love with the son of one's first love, and if so, have a life with someone so much younger (and virile)? Despite the transparent efficiency of substituting the love interest's son for the original—and despite the truly shameless level of sentimentality and bathos—McKinnon may have hit the jackpot. (First serial rights to Good Housekeeping; TV rights to TriStar; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48993-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.
The husband-and-wife team who have given us refreshing English versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov now present their lucid translation of Tolstoy's panoramic tale of adultery and society: a masterwork that may well be the greatest realistic novel ever written. It's a beautifully structured fiction, which contrasts the aristocratic world of two prominent families with the ideal utopian one dreamed by earnest Konstantin Levin (a virtual self-portrait). The characters of the enchanting Anna (a descendant of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest, and forerunner of countless later literary heroines), the lover (Vronsky) who proves worthy of her indiscretion, her bloodless husband Karenin and ingenuous epicurean brother Stiva, among many others, are quite literally unforgettable. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this splendid translation is the skill with which it distinguishes the accents of Anna's romantic egoism from the spare narrative clarity with which a vast spectrum of Russian life is vividly portrayed.
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89478-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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