A sizzling, sexy romance and a rewarding continuation of a family series.
Sparks fly when a star soccer player meets his team’s sponsorship manager in this fifth installment of a series.
As a top player for the LA Lords soccer team, Jace Connor is accustomed to a fast-paced lifestyle and plenty of attention from the media and adoring female fans. Love is the last thing on his mind until he meets Brooke Derringer, the team’s new sponsorship business development manager. Brooke needs a fresh start after weathering the breakup of a long-term relationship and leaving her job at a fashion magazine. She is excited about the position but nervous because the LA Lords’ coach is her father, Stephen. She wants to prove that she was hired for her business experience and not because of family connections. Jace is immediately attracted to Brooke, but she is wary of getting involved with him because she does not want to mix her personal and professional lives as she did at the magazine. While working with Jace on endorsement opportunities, Brooke discovers another side of him, one devoted to his family and community. Jace is determined to win Brooke’s heart, and their impromptu dinners and workout sessions at the gym blossom into a passionate romance. Jace and Brooke want a future together. But when Jace’s dispute with a jealous teammate spirals into a public relations nightmare, the couple must decide whether their love is worth fighting for. This installment of Hagen’s (Only With You, 2019, etc.) Connor Family series is a briskly paced and satisfying contemporary romance that builds on the author’s talent for creating endearing characters and heartfelt and deeply passionate love stories. Hagen sticks with the engaging narrative style found throughout the series. The lively and fast-moving chapters alternate between Jace’s and Brooke’s first-person perspectives. This technique allows the author to fully develop the characters and their motivations, particularly Brooke’s initial desire to establish personal and professional boundaries between her and Jace. Their romance develops at a gradual pace as they navigate the dynamics of a workplace relationship. While Jace and Brooke’s bond is the primary focus of the novel, a well-developed subplot involving the athlete’s teammate Levi provides the tension that leads to a crisis for the nascent couple. Fans of the series should also enjoy return appearances from members of the Connor family.
A sizzling, sexy romance and a rewarding continuation of a family series.Pub Date: June 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-972808-2
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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