An enemies-to-lovers romance that engages neither with complexities of animosity nor the simplicity of love.
A lawyer must stop litigating the past to find love in the present.
The Blum and Stark families have been thickly intertwined for years, since they moved in across the street from each other in Hoboken, New Jersey, when their kids were small. Now, Molly Blum and Jude Stark’s older siblings have decided to join forces to throw a joint wedding anniversary party for their parents. Although Jude and Molly once got along as well as the rest of their families, their friendship dissolved abruptly when they were children. Molly became locked into a war of nasty pranks with Jude until a life-altering incident precipitated an uneasy truce between the warring parties. But meeting a decade after the détente, and especially being forced to tour prospective party venues together, reignites their old animosity. Molly and Jude are on the brink of descending into a familiar rivalry when they consciously decide to put a halt to their antics. Forced to look at Jude from a new perspective, Molly realizes that not only has she consistently been dating men who remind her of her childhood friend-turned-enemy, but also that she has long been nursing a sexual attraction for Jude. Molly decides to act on her growing feelings, but their shared history might just block her way to a future with the man she has always desired. Since the story is told entirely from Molly’s point of view, the rivalry at its center seems half-baked, and the shift in the protagonists’ attitudes toward each other, ill-explained and abrupt. The resolution of Molly’s familial and romantic troubles strikes a flat note, but her professional struggles ring with authenticity. Schorr builds an entertaining world with interesting secondary characters but is unable to convincingly map the trajectory of the protagonists’ evolving relationship.
An enemies-to-lovers romance that engages neither with complexities of animosity nor the simplicity of love.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781538754801
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forever
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.
Two struggling authors spend the summer writing and falling in love in a quaint beach town.
January Andrews has just arrived in the small town of North Bear Shores with some serious baggage. Her father has been dead for a year, but she still hasn’t come to terms with what she found out at his funeral—he had been cheating on her mother for years. January plans to spend the summer cleaning out and selling the house her father and “That Woman” lived in together. But she’s also a down-on-her-luck author facing writer’s block, and she no longer believes in the happily-ever-after she’s made the benchmark of her work. Her steadily dwindling bank account, though, is a daily reminder that she must sell her next book, and fast. Serendipitously, she discovers that her new next-door neighbor is Augustus Everett, the darling of the literary fiction set and her former college rival/crush. Gus also happens to be struggling with his next book (and some serious trauma that unfolds throughout the novel). Though the two get off to a rocky start, they soon make a bet: Gus will try to write a romance novel, and January will attempt “bleak literary fiction.” They spend the summer teaching each other the art of their own genres—January takes Gus on a romantic outing to the local carnival; Gus takes January to the burned-down remains of a former cult—and they both process their own grief, loss, and trauma through this experiment. There are more than enough steamy scenes to sustain the slow-burn romance, and smart commentary on the placement and purpose of “women’s fiction” joins with crucial conversations about mental health to add multiple intriguing layers to the plot.
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0673-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Jove/Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
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