Sweet and intense, with delightful magical accents, a delectable romance—and yummy recipes.
Broke, divorced and disheartened, Portia Cuthcart leaves Texas for Manhattan, determined to sort out her life and finally embrace her magical way with food.
Portia has inherited a magical gift from a long line of Texas women who offered advice and, inexplicably, the perfect healing dish, but a tragic event caused her to turn her back on this "knowing" and live a normal life. Years later, betrayed by her Texas politician husband, she flees to New York City, where her two sisters live and where she owns the garden apartment in a brownstone. Her sisters have sold their portions of the house to Gabriel Kane, a renowned financier who expects her to sign over her share as well but is stymied when she moves in instead. When Kane’s younger daughter, Ariel, stumbles into a fabulous meal Portia makes for her sisters, she convinces her father to offer her a job as their cook. At first resistant, Portia accepts when she realizes her ex-husband is reneging on her divorce settlement, then sets about trying to open a cafe styled after The Glass Kitchen, a restaurant her family owned for generations in Texas. But as her sisters’ lives unravel, and she becomes more entwined in the Kanes’ well-being, Portia realizes how little she knows about the gift and how unprepared she is to handle the grief and confusion of the family upstairs. Lee takes a new magical direction after the success of Emily and Einstein (2011) and brings a light yet emotional touch as she combines food fiction with magical realism in a satisfying effort only slightly marred by Portia’s continually fluctuating feelings about her gift. However, Kane’s tight-lipped Yankee demeanor paired with Portia’s conflicted feelings make for powerful—and sexy—conflict, and Ariel’s attempts to fix her fractured family are affecting and pave the way for true connection with their magical neighbor.
Sweet and intense, with delightful magical accents, a delectable romance—and yummy recipes.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-38227-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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