Adept at creating romantic fiction for women who want to think they are above romantic fiction, de los Santos offers...
In the latest from de los Santos (Belong to Me, 2008, etc.), a single mother’s effort to reunite with her two best friends from college after a six-year silence doesn’t pan out exactly as she expected.
After Pen met Cat (their cute, sexually ambiguous names a telling coincidence) and Will at the start of their freshman year at an unnamed Southern college, the three quickly recognized they were soul mates and became inseparable. Other friends and even lovers had to play second fiddle to their platonic threesome. After college, the three lived together until petite, half-Filipino Cat, who suffered from occasional epileptic seizures and was the most vivacious and quirky member of the group, decided she wanted to get married and moved out. The friendship was so intense that it could not survive alteration, and soon Will moved out too. In the ensuing six years, Pen has heard nothing from her friends. She is living with her brother while raising her 5-year-old daughter Augusta, the result of an affair with a likable jerk who has returned to his former wife, when she receives an e-mail from Cat begging her to meet at their college reunion. Will, now an author of children’s books, receives the same e-mail and shows up too. But instead of Cat, Cat’s husband Jason appears. He sent the e-mails and now begs them to help him find Cat, who disappeared shortly after her father’s death (Pen is still mourning the death of her own father two years earlier while Will’s father is alive but out of his life). Soon the three, plus Augusta, head to the Philippines. Pen and Will grapple with their confused, perhaps not so platonic feelings for each other as well as their ambivalence toward crude but oddly sympathetic Jason, a dead ringer for the actor Jason Segel.
Adept at creating romantic fiction for women who want to think they are above romantic fiction, de los Santos offers ever-so-sensitive protagonists who are surprisingly dense about their actual feelings.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-167087-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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