Despite a few stumbling blocks, a page-turner with as much grit as the Texas countryside.
In Trow’s unsettling debut, a morally ambiguous man discovers that the straight and narrow is a rocky road at best.
Richard C. Harrison is an innocent man, an ex-CPA, serving a 20-year sentence in an East Texas “prison farm” because he happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time—an unwitting accomplice to an armed robbery executed by his half brother, Pete. Life drifts along aimlessly until Harrison meets the gorgeous Elizabeth McKenna, an attorney who has been assigned a fellow prisoner’s case. Even if the talented lawyer visits the compound only once, she haunts Harrison’s every waking minute and more importantly, gives him a renewed purpose. Escaping from prison, he lands in the warm embrace of a drug-dealing family and changes his name to Joe Travis. While serving as the drug dealers’ gofer, the newly reinvented Travis plots a way to McKenna’s heart and home in Austin. Uncomfortably creepy? Certainly. For her part, McKenna alternates between fascination and fear of this poetry-spewing man who seems to harbor some decency under a very tortured exterior. Unfortunately, she gets sucked into the maelstrom of his increasingly unstable and dangerous moves until things go careening off the edge. Trow’s portrait of a train wreck of a man battling his baser impulses is as curiously mesmerizing as it is revolting. McKenna’s motivations also feel real and understandable, if not always commendable. Unfortunately, the supplemental characters who pepper the narrative—criminal Deep Eddy, drug dealer Early—stick out like cardboard cutouts serving only to move the story along. Also, the storyline can lurch abruptly, leaving some subplots unresolved. Finally, Harrison’s conveniently flawed memory is a construct a little too neat to be wholly believable. Still, it’s no mean feat to write a compelling novel based on characters who are difficult to like, yet Trow more or less pulls it off.
Despite a few stumbling blocks, a page-turner with as much grit as the Texas countryside.Pub Date: June 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-68003-030-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable...
An unlucky woman finally gets lucky in love on an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii.
From getting her hand stuck in a claw machine at age 6 to losing her job, Olive Torres has never felt that luck was on her side. But her fortune changes when she scores a free vacation after her identical twin sister and new brother-in-law get food poisoning at their wedding buffet and are too sick to go on their honeymoon. The only catch is that she’ll have to share the honeymoon suite with her least favorite person—Ethan Thomas, the brother of the groom. To make matters worse, Olive’s new boss and Ethan’s ex-girlfriend show up in Hawaii, forcing them both to pretend to be newlyweds so they don’t blow their cover, as their all-inclusive vacation package is nontransferable and in her sister’s name. Plus, Ethan really wants to save face in front of his ex. The story is told almost exclusively from Olive’s point of view, filtering all communication through her cynical lens until Ethan can win her over (and finally have his say in the epilogue). To get to the happily-ever-after, Ethan doesn’t have to prove to Olive that he can be a better man, only that he was never the jerk she thought he was—for instance, when she thought he was judging her for eating cheese curds, maybe he was actually thinking of asking her out. Blending witty banter with healthy adult communication, the fake newlyweds have real chemistry as they talk it out over snorkeling trips, couples massages, and a few too many tropical drinks to get to the truth—that they’re crazy about each other.
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable as well as free.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2803-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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