A promising author who doesn’t have the recipe quite right yet.
Can a purple-haired pastry chef with a whisk and spatula tattoo on her derriere find happiness baking in rustic Vermont?
After 32-year-old Olivia Rawlings, carrying a flambé dessert, accidentally sets fire to the swank private club in Boston where she works, she flees north to Guthrie, Vermont, where her best friend lives. By unlikely coincidence, there's an opening for a pastry chef at the picturesque Sugar Maple Inn nearby. Although she's a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and has been nominated for a James Beard award, Olivia soon falls into step with her small-town colleagues, even the inn’s prickly proprietor, Margaret Hurley, whose personality approximates biting “into a raw cranberry.” Olivia whips up many a frangipane tart as she becomes enmeshed in the small town’s intrigues. She becomes increasingly enamored of Martin McCracken, a laconic Seattle teacher and musician, who grew up in Guthrie but bolted to elude his close-knit family’s smothering grasp and has now returned to help out with the farm since his father has cancer. Olivia, who has some weaknesses when it comes to both alcohol and men, discovers too late that Martin has a fiancee back home in Seattle. By then, Martin’s mother and ailing father have become surrogate parents to Olivia, whose mother abandoned her as a baby. Meanwhile, no one in Guthrie seems to be bothered by Olivia's bizarre hair-color changes (“Manic Panic Atomic Turquoise,” anyone?) and occasionally coarse language (“God, what is up that woman’s butt?”). Will Olivia be able to hold on to the elusive Martin? Will she help Margaret win the prestigious annual apple pie competition at the Coventry County Fair? Debut novelist Miller, herself a Boston pastry chef, initially succeeds in making these small-town concerns engaging with her witty writing. But what starts out as homespun charm in the first half of the book becomes treacly in the second.
A promising author who doesn’t have the recipe quite right yet.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98120-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Astute, insightful, and descriptive storytelling; a strong step in a new direction for Singh.
Soon after a widowed pianist returns to her tiny hometown in coastal New Zealand, a woman disappears, echoing the events of a summer when she was a teenager and everything shifted for her and her friends.
After burying her husband, Anahera Rawiri leaves London to return to Golden Cove, which sits next to the South Pacific Ocean and inside a “primal and untamed landscape.” Anahera has been gone for years, married to a rich playwright, living in London, traveling the world as a classical pianist. She’s remained close to her best friend, Josie, but only vaguely kept in touch with other Golden Cove friends; the teenage dissensions that began along social and economic lines in their group of friends grew into adult schisms exacerbated by betrayals and rivalries. Almost as soon as Anahera settles into the remote cabin her mother left her, beautiful young Miriama, who works at Josie's cafe, disappears. When the village comes together to search for her, Anahera acts as a bridge for the local policeman, Will, who is still considered an outsider, and she soon realizes that her friends and the town may harbor dark secrets: “Everyone has hidden corners of their life, even the people we think we know inside and out.” As she and Will follow the clues and discover more about her friends, the townspeople, and each other, they connect in profound ways even as they begin to suspect the search for Miriama may be connected to the disappearance of three female hikers one summer when Ana was a teenager. Popular romance author Singh shifts to a new genre, New Zealand gothic, in which nearly every character—including the dense, ferocious landscape—has something to hide, and studying them is nearly as fascinating and compelling as solving the multifaceted mystery.
Astute, insightful, and descriptive storytelling; a strong step in a new direction for Singh.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-09913-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
To her usual mix of love, mystery, and passion, Roberts (Sanctuary, 1997, etc.)—author of 115 romancers in some 17 years—adds Renaissance art and a decidedly Medici-like family: the Joneses of Maine. Dr. Miranda Jones, nearly six feet with flaming red hair and a glacial reserve, is an archeometrist who specializes in the analyzing and dating of Renaissance bronze sculpture. Miranda hopes to secure a world-class reputation for herself by authenticating a 15th-century statue of the Dark Lady, one of the mistresses of Lorenzo the Magnificent, as the undiscovered work of a young Michelangelo. Miranda's mother, Dr. Elizabeth Standford-Jones, the emotionally remote director of the Standjo art lab in Florence, has summoned her daughter from the family's Victorian cliffside home in Jones Point, Maine, to test the statue. Meanwhile, Miranda's father, equally remote, is an archaeologist who spends more time at his digs than at home. In fact, no one in the Jones family has made a successful run at marriage, a failure that Miranda and her alcoholic brother Andrew call the Jones curse. As for the statue, when it's discovered to be a fake, Miranda sets out to prove that someone stole the original. In this she's helped by gorgeous art thief Ryan Boldari (half-Italian, half-Irish), who's come to Jones Point to steal yet another bronze, which also turns out to be a forgery. Ryan's plan had been to use Miranda as a pawn, but now, naturally, he finds himself falling hard for her. While the two search for bronzes, a standard-issue romance-novel psychotic is stalking them. Most readers will twig to the killer's identity: Here, as always, Roberts's sexual tension is more compelling than her suspense. Perhaps it's time to take a sabbatical from the pink sweatshop and turn her considerable wit and narrative skills to a more original piece of work.
Pub Date: March 23, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14387-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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