A return to what the author does best: heartfelt family drama, gracefully written and poignant.
You can go home again.
As Margaret Porter drifts into happy senility, Sylvie, her dutiful daughter (a school librarian), takes over her care. Jane, her wayward daughter (a baker of upscale goodies), comes back from New York to the family’s rural Rhode Island home, carrying a gooey, sugary cake for her diabetic mother’s birthday. Sylvie scolds and Jane feels as if she can’t do anything right. And she still feels guilty over the secret that their mother has seemingly forgotten. The years are slipping by faster and faster, but Twin Rivers hasn’t changed all that much—has she? Jane doesn’t really know. Driving down a rural road, she spies a ruggedly attractive man working in the old orchard that belongs to the Chadwicks, the adoptive parents of Chloe, a headstrong but charming teenager, warmly and believably drawn by author Rice (The Perfect Summer, 2001), etc.). Chloe champions vegan beliefs and is generally given to eccentric behavior that distresses her straight-arrow parents. But shy Jane befriends the girl and wastes no time falling in love with Dylan Chadwick, the man she saw in the orchard. He’s a retired US Marshal from New York whose estranged wife and beloved daughter died in a shooting. Chloe is close to him—and has no idea that Jane is her birth mother, or that Jane was pressured into giving her up by Margaret, who’d raised her own two daughters by herself when their good-for-nothing father skipped out. An imperfect but much deserved happy ending awaits all. Thankfully, Rice keeps it real this time and skips the contrivances—child angels, blind heroes, overwrought suspense—that plagued her recent outings.
A return to what the author does best: heartfelt family drama, gracefully written and poignant.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-553-80227-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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