Aside from the problematic ending, a serviceable, well-paced romance.
Pimentel (Love by the Book, 2015, etc.) joins the ongoing modernized–Jane Austen trend with this take on Persuasion.
With broader and less vibrant strokes than Austen, Pimentel paints a picture of Ruby Atlas, a 32-year-old New Yorker who humbly considers herself a success by the city’s tough standards: she has a consuming job at an advertising firm, her own tiny apartment in the East Village, and even a personal trainer, all hard-won. Conversely, Piper, her younger, perfectionist sister, will soon have a storybook wedding at a castle in England. As Ruby prepares to leave for the wedding, she is terrified of seeing one of the guests, her first love, Ethan, now a wildly successful tech guy and best friend of the groom. The prospect amps up a load of insecurities for Ruby, both professional and romantic. Readers of Persuasion will know where this is headed, and those unfamiliar will easily guess. Emotional self-preservation leads both parties to pretend they no longer matter to each other, which gives Ruby plenty of time to tend to her difficult family and fix a series of wedding-related disasters. It’s not until her father has a health scare that the stakes are high enough, and Ethan solicitous enough, for Ruby to admit how she feels. Alternating flashback chapters illuminate Ruby and Ethan’s young, ardent relationship and build to what ultimately drove them apart. Some of these reasons are quite poignant, stemming from Ruby’s unforgiving expectations of herself as a young person building an adult life. Unfortunately, a late-revealed piece of the puzzle involves sexual assault, which the novel handles in a troublingly retrograde way.
Aside from the problematic ending, a serviceable, well-paced romance.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-13037-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
An effective infomercial—and guest-room sleep-aid—for Inn BoonsBoro.
In Roberts’ new series launch, the conversion of a tumbledown Maryland hotel into a boutique country inn fails to expel an extremely shy resident ghost.
The first half of the novel, essentially an extended prologue, is painstakingly slow. As Roberts demonstrates a newfound passion for construction minutia (perhaps because she renovated and owns Inn Boonsboro in real life), the activities of architect Beckett Montgomery and his two builder brothers as they retrofit a historic building in Boonsboro (near the Antietam battlefield) unfold almost in real time. Working under the supervision of their benevolent tyrant of a mother, the brothers exchange good-natured macho gibes as they appoint the Inn-to-be with the most opulent tile, woodwork and fixtures. Amid all the bromance, Beckett watches longingly as his crush since grade school, Clare, goes about running her amazingly profitable independent bookstore while raising three unruly boys alone. (Her soldier husband died in Iraq.) Does she or doesn’t she notice him, Beckett muses ad infinitum. Meanwhile, Clare tells herself that Beckett is not really interested, just being kind to a war widow. Once this minor miscommunication is cleared up, the two begin a tentative relationship, however, the necessity of introducing obstacles to true love has Roberts stretching for things for them to squabble about, including the sighting by Clare’s youngest son of a ghostly lady dressed in an old-timey long gown, staring from an upper story window of the Inn. (The ghost, nicknamed “Lizzy,” has betrayed her presence to Beckett and a few others only with a scent of honeysuckle and a penchant for opening doors.) Cartoonish villain Sam, the spoiled, indolent son of the area’s wealthiest family, stalks Clare and tries to take indecent liberties, but his belated appearance, and his failure to pose a believable threat, do little to propel the plot. The fictional doppelganger of Boonsboro is an anachronistic bubble, seemingly untouched by the blight besetting so many American small towns.
An effective infomercial—and guest-room sleep-aid—for Inn BoonsBoro.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-24321-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Reid’s tome on married life is as uplifting as it is brutally honest—a must-read for anyone who is in (or hopes to be in) a...
An unhappily married couple spends a year apart in Reid’s (Forever, Interrupted, 2013) novel about second chances.
When we meet Lauren, she and her husband, Ryan, are having a meltdown trying to find their car in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium after a game. Through a series of flashbacks, Lauren reveals how the two of them went from being inseparable to being insufferable in each other’s eyes—and in desperate need of a break. Both their courtship and their fights seem so ordinary—they met in college; he doesn’t like Greek food—that the most heartbreaking part of their pending separation is deciding who will get custody of their good-natured dog. It’s not until Ryan moves out that the juicy details emerge. Lauren surreptitiously logs into his email one day, in a fit of missing him, and discovers a bunch of emails to her that he had saved but not sent. Liberated by Ryan’s candor, Lauren saves her replies for him to find, and the two of them read each other’s unfiltered thoughts as they go about their separate lives. Neither character holds anything back, which makes the healing process more complex, and more compelling, than simply getting revenge or getting one’s groove back. Meanwhile, as Lauren spends more time with her family and friends, she explores the example set for her by her parents and learns that there are many ways to be happy. It’s never clear until the final pages whether living alone will bring Lauren and Ryan back together or force them apart forever. But when the year is up, the resolution is neither sappy nor cynical; it’s arrived at after an honest assessment of what each partner can’t live with and can’t live without.
Reid’s tome on married life is as uplifting as it is brutally honest—a must-read for anyone who is in (or hopes to be in) a committed relationship.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1284-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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