by Krystal Ford ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2018
An upbeat and thoughtful blend of romance and politics.
In Ford’s debut novel, an unwed woman has her sights set on political office and searches for a powerful partner to help get her there.
Soon after U.S. Rep. White (R-Florida) secures another term, he taps his campaign manager, Megan Thompson, to be his 2018 successor, and he offers her a job as his aide in Washington, D.C., in charge of energy and environmental legislation. However, the fact that she’s a single woman—she recently called off a wedding when she discovered that her fiance cheated on her with her best friend—could be off-putting to voters, especially social conservatives. So White arranges for Megan to go on a dating tour to find a “strategic power match,” though she largely finds disappointment instead. Eventually, though, she meets Brock Tolbert, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association who’s charming, well-connected, and handsome—politically perfect. Meanwhile, she sees her new roommate, Andrew Croswell, as the bane of her existence; she thinks that he’s a smug, opinionated, “liberal libido killer.” He works for a group that’s lobbying for a more robust approach to climate change. Although his and Megan’s relationship begins in mutual acrimony, their enmity soon eases into friendly détente and then sweetly flirts with something deeper—and less platonic. Author Ford pulls off an impressive trick, artfully combining two seemingly incongruent genres in a companionably lighthearted romance and an astute political commentary on transcending partisanship. The author has a refreshing talent for humanizing ideological conflict, and both Megan and Andrew turn out to be far more complex than their political leanings would suggest. The plot occasionally loses its steam and slows to a meandering stroll, and the novel as whole would benefit from a shorter page count. Also, Andrew is initially presented as so insufferably shrill, that it isn’t easy for Ford, or the reader, to get rid of that first impression. However, this is a subtly ambitious work that doesn’t shy away from contentious subjects, such as same-sex marriage and climate change, and it squarely confronts the most controversial topic of the day—the presidency of Donald Trump.
An upbeat and thoughtful blend of romance and politics.Pub Date: July 15, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 448
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A tour de force.
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New York Times Bestseller
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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