An engaging, emotionally resonant story of resurfacing after deep grief.
In Granata’s romance, the aftermath of a devastating accident unites two longtime acquaintances struggling with loss.
Life was never easy for Merritt Adams. Her mother abandoned the family without a word of explanation, leaving her to care for her despondent father. He later struggled with mental illness for several years until he took his life. The night of her father’s funeral, Merritt gets drunk and crashes her car, and the intervention of a stranger saves her from a fiery death. Unable to continue her studies while she recovers from her injuries, Merritt drops out of college and moves in with her best friend, Shelly. The last person she expects to offer help is Chase Brooks. Merritt and Shelly grew up with Chase, and after high school, he left Staten Island to pursue a music career in California. Two years later, he’s back to help his family and his terminally ill father. A friendship develops between the gregarious Chase and the more reserved Merritt, and his family warmly welcomes her. As their relationship turns romantic, Chase’s family experiences a crisis that threatens to expose a secret about the night of Merritt’s accident. Granata’s debut is a sensitive, finely observed study of heartache and the ability of love to heal trauma. While the subject is serious, the pace doesn’t dawdle in this well-developed, believable romance. And the mystery surrounding Merritt’s mother’s decision to abandon her family emerges as an intriguing subplot and fodder for a sequel. While Granata’s storytelling is solid, the narrative could use additional editing (X-Men character Jean Grey is referred to as “Gene Grey”).
An engaging, emotionally resonant story of resurfacing after deep grief.Pub Date: March 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-980590-42-2
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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