Despite intellectual pretentions, including lots of references to Middlemarch, de los Santos (Falling Together, 2011, etc.)...
Half sisters who don’t really know each other are brought together by their emotionally domineering father for reasons of his own.
Inventor/professor/entrepreneur Wilson left his first wife and their adolescent twins, Taisy and Marcus, 17 years ago, and he hasn't seen them in 15 years, since the first birthday party for Willow, his daughter with his new, much younger wife, sculptor Caro. But when Wilson invites Taisy, now a successful ghostwriter in her 30s, to visit him after his heart surgery, she quickly agrees. As she travels, Taisy thinks about her high school boyfriend, Ben, and the way her father destroyed their relationship. What a coincidence that Ben turns up back in town, too. Realizing that her father wants her to ghostwrite his biography, Taisy decides to learn his real story. For all his genius, Wilson has warped almost all the lives he’s touched. As Taisy starts her research, she also begins to re-establish a relationship with the unbelievably sensitive Ben as if neither has changed in almost two decades. Meanwhile, Willow—who considers herself Wilson’s “true daughter”—is struggling. Despite appearing tall, beautiful and collected, she's intimidated by her older sister’s visit. She's also judgmental, assuming Taisy did something horrific to alienate their father, who's shown his younger daughter nothing but affection. And she's having difficulty adjusting to the private high school she’s begun attending while Wilson recuperates. Home-schooled by Wilson through her entire childhood, Willow has little experience of peer friendship or the outside world in general. Soon she has a dangerous crush on her English teacher, but waiting in the wings is a high school boy almost as perfect for her as Ben is for Taisy.
Despite intellectual pretentions, including lots of references to Middlemarch, de los Santos (Falling Together, 2011, etc.) offers a comfort-food story in which men are either predators or perfect and women are both beautiful and brilliant.Pub Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-167089-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
A sweeping romantic tale of thwarted love.
Sixty years after her first love failed to meet her in a market square, Roya Khanom Archer finally has the chance to see him. But will he break her heart again?
Back in 1953, she was a 17-year-old schoolgirl, raised in a progressive home in Tehran, where her father encouraged Roya and her sister, Zari, to take advantage of the recent reforms that allowed women to go to university. While he hoped she might become a chemist, Roya loved escaping into novels, which sent her to Mr. Fakhri’s stationery and book store every Tuesday afternoon. There she first sees Bahman Aslan, a breathless young man already well-known as a political activist. Kamali (Together Tea, 2013) sets Roya and Bahman’s love against the tumultuous days of Mohammad Mossadegh’s rise and fall as prime minister of Iran, infusing their affair with political passion and an increasingly frantic sense of the shortness of time. Tuesday after Tuesday, the couple falls more deeply in love, and Bahman soon proposes marriage to Roya. While Roya’s family welcomes Bahman—although Zari warns Roya that his heart cannot be trusted—Bahman’s emotionally volatile mother refuses to accept the engagement, because she has already chosen Shahla, the daughter of a man closely allied with the shah, for her son. Roya determines to weather her future mother-in-law’s storms, but when Bahman and his family disappear, she can only turn to Mr. Fakhri for help. Although he cannot tell Roya where Bahman has gone, Mr. Fakhri offers to exchange secret letters between the lovers. The plan works, and the two even plan to elope, but Bahman does not show up in Sepah Square. Sixty years later, Bahman’s confession will finally expose the secrets that cast shadows over the lovers so long ago.
A sweeping romantic tale of thwarted love.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0748-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A flawed but never dull drama.
A disadvantaged teen finds friendship, acceptance and love with a prosperous Seattle-area family, until a tragic accident changes everything.
Alexa (Lexi) Baill, daughter of a heroin addict, has bounced around the foster-care system for years. A long-lost great aunt, Eva, a Walmart employee, offers Lexi a home in her trailer across the bridge from Pine Island (Hannah’s fictional stand-in for Bainbridge Island) near Seattle. At Pine Island High School, Mia, daughter of Jude and Miles Farraday, and twin sister of Zachary, considers herself an outcast. She bonds instantly with the equally alienated Lexi. Soon, the Farraday’s opulent Pine Island residence is Lexi’s second home. As senior year approaches, Lexi and Zach fall in love and are relieved that Mia approves. Jude, whose days are a pleasant whirl of caring for her elaborate garden and being a supermom, has a strained relationship with her own mother. As seniors, Zach, Mia and Lexi can’t avoid Pine Island’s teen party scene. One foggy night, Zach and Mia get falling-down drunk, and Lexi, less inebriated, urges Zach to let her drive his Mustang home. (The question of who actually drove is left vague, which dodges several moral bullets, to the story’s detriment.) On a hairpin curve, the Mustang spins out and crashes. Mia is thrown from the backseat and killed. Zach and Lexi sustain milder injuries, but Lexi’s blood-alcohol level was above the legal limit, and she accepts the blame for killing Mia. Jude turns against her implacably. Lexi, unwilling to burden Eva with the expense of a trial, pleads guilty to vehicular homicide and serves over five years in prison. While incarcerated, she gives birth to Zach’s child, Grace, and relinquishes her to the Farradays. Grace bears such an uncanny resemblance to Mia that Jude finds it almost impossible to warm to her. Released from prison, Lexi returns to Pine Island, only to find that her daughter is as isolated and distrustful as any foster child.
A flawed but never dull drama.Pub Date: March 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-36442-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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