by Mary Flinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2015
An uplifting tale of love and redemption that’s perfect for fans of stories of rehabilitated youth and second chances.
A breezy romance about a single mother who tries to reinvent herself after her young-adult son leaves the nest.
Flinn (The Nest, 2015, etc.) has created a memorable, multidimensional heroine in Elle McLarin, a lonely middle-aged woman stuck in small-town North Carolina, where she can’t escape her criminal past. During her teenage years, Elle spent 12 months in prison as punishment for slipping her high school crush a roofie and taking advantage of him. She was pregnant with another man’s child at the start of her incarceration, and by the time of her release, she had an infant son and a scandalous reputation that she couldn’t live down. As the book opens, her son has turned 18 and left for the Army. Elle, now 37 years old, is finally able to leave town and start fresh. She drives across the state and settles on the North Carolina coast, where she opens a bakery and begins making new friends for the first time in nearly two decades. It’s not long, however, before her past catches up with her. After she finally begins to enjoy her new successes and even explore a relationship with her handsome neighbor, an odd sequence of events lands her in the spotlight on national news. Her new beau, Nate, learns all about the inglorious woman she used to be, and she worries that their budding relationship won’t survive. The strengths of this engaging, plot-heavy page-turner are in its character development of Elle and the perfect pitch of its narrative voice. Flinn depicts Elle as a complicated woman with constantly conflicting emotions. As the first-person narrator, she’s initially quite unlikable but gradually reveals that beneath her seemingly uneducated persona is an intelligent, pragmatic, and bighearted woman who’s worked hard to improve herself. Readers won’t be able to help rooting for her to find happiness as the story winds its way to its conclusion.
An uplifting tale of love and redemption that’s perfect for fans of stories of rehabilitated youth and second chances.Pub Date: May 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0990719779
Page Count: 366
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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