There’s not a dull moment for this fantasy’s protagonist—no matter whose daughter she is.
A young woman must prove her noble lineage in order to break a curse in the second installment of Edwards’ (The Farrier’s Daughter, 2014) fantasy/romance series.
After fleeing Castle O’Brien, Alainn wanders the streets of Galway. Though she’s secretly pregnant, openly brokenhearted, and wholly uncertain about what to do next, she’s convinced that she had to leave her lover, Killian, so he could fulfill his destiny to become a great leader. But Killian convinces her to come home and marry him despite the fact that he’s betrothed to another woman—a suitably upper-class and surprisingly likable Scottish lass. Back at Castle O’Brien, Killian’s uncle, the clan’s malevolent and all-powerful chief, forbids a union between his nephew and Alainn. He also knows about her supernatural powers, which must be protected from the grasp of dark spirits, but he promises to leave her alone if she marries another man. As their respective wedding days approach, Alainn and Killian, both hotheaded and sharp-tongued, spar over a misunderstanding. Meanwhile, her friends soon notice that she’s expecting a child. Lady Siobhan, Killian’s kindly aunt, also realizes that Alainn has an uncanny resemblance to the members of her own noble family. Despite the young heroine’s many positive qualities, including unparalleled beauty, intellect, and magical powers including mind-reading and controlling the weather, Edwards shows that she’s also driven by passion rather than logic. This tendency makes Alainn rather slow to comprehend solutions to her problems, such as a curse that’s plagued the O’Brien family for decades. As a result, readers will likely see where the story is going long before its protagonist does, but it’s an action-packed page-turner nonetheless. Alainn and Killian’s sexy romance, as described here, is worth fighting for, even if their dialogue is often over-the-top; for example, while admiring a scenic view, she tells him, in all seriousness, “I have never beheld such an astounding, impressive sight. Apart from seeing you unclothed, of course.” Although it’s set in Ireland during its tumultuous 16th century, this book is more of a romance than a historical. It touches on elements such as Henry VIII and his wives and the impending British conquest, but it does so only in passing.
There’s not a dull moment for this fantasy’s protagonist—no matter whose daughter she is.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1460208731
Page Count: 200
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
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
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
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