A fine debut, written with style and heart.
Love and second chances sprout like fragile desert wildflowers in this winsome romance.
With her husband in a coma for six years now, Melanie Greyson figures it’s time to start over, so she packs up and moves to the northern Arizona village of Buena Suerte to take a teaching job. Her three kids—especially 17-year-old daughter K.C, dragged away from her friends and trumpet lessons during her senior year—are not amused when they see the tiny burg and the flyblown trailer in which they’ll be living. The Greysons’ malaise lifts, though, when Jesse Cockran, the school’s new music teacher, complete with pony tail, piercing blue eyes, well-muscled frame and haunting trumpet technique, roars up on his Harley and moves in across the street. Soon Jesse is flirting up a storm with Melanie and inspiring K.C., who finds her dreamboat in football captain Cooke Nasby, a soulful if sometimes exasperating boy from the Apache reservation. As Melanie and K.C. plunge into their sometimes tender, sometimes testy romances—the one young and passionate, the other mature and much more passionate—readers will settle happily in with their engaging story, which the author tells with a good feel for the tingling excitement, awkward hesitancies and sudden abandon of new love. Alas, complications both external and internal threaten their bliss: K.C. and Cooke confront the minefield of sex, Jesse battles a hostile school board president and a junkie, harridan ex-wife, and Melanie finds herself torn between her raging attraction to Jesse and her loyalty to her husband—a dilemma made more agonizing by family pressure to pull the plug. In her first novel, Hinton strikes a nice balance between realism and melodrama. She writes a supple prose and populates her small but by no means insignificant town with vivid characters possessing rich, complex emotional lives. We can’t help rooting for Melanie and K.C. as they fight their way through the tug-of-war between desire and responsibility.
A fine debut, written with style and heart.Pub Date: July 30, 2007
ISBN: 978-1412098410
Page Count: 442
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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