An uneven portrait of difficult love.
Caleb, a fictional Coast Guardsman, falls in love with Caribé, a Dominican woman he rescues, and they attempt to relocate during her illegal escape from the Dominican Republic.
Set within the rough confines of poverty, Caribé’s story—though fictional—addresses the experience of Caribbean citizens who risk their lives to reach the promise of a better life in the U.S. After losing her family at sea when a previous escape attempt goes awry, Caribé is more determined than ever to leave behind the Dominican Republic and its looming threats to her safety. As she struggles to raise enough money to both survive and fund her escape, Caribé continues to dodge violent intimidations from Raul, a drug trafficker bent on using her for the trade. Once able to pay for the next yola headed for America, she struggles with the fear, starvation and filth that accompany illegal immigration. Days later, the U.S. Coast Guard stops her boat after it loses engine power, and the dehydrated passengers are transferred to the Coast Guard’s cutter to be transported back home. Amid the chaos, Caribé meets Caleb, a young member of the Coast Guard responsible for rescuing her yola; upon returning to Dominican shores, they bond over the rescue. Caleb’s crew regularly returns to the port, so he begins to see Caribé for meals, drinks and travel, before they exchange contact information and make plans for future visits. As Caleb falls for her, despite mocking from his crew, Caribé works to maintain an image that hides her hardships from him. Their love growing, the couple faces challenges to their relationship from forces greater than themselves—the complex, tragic systems of nationality and privilege that govern the world. Yet the story becomes rather one-dimensional, as the omniscient narrator focuses too much on romance, foregoing the realistic depiction of the disproportionate struggles they face. Although the narrator lingers on the details of Caleb’s life aboard his ship, readers will lose a sense of Caribe’s life as a Caribbean woman dealing with impressive hardships: potential poverty, national unrest, complex racial structures, etc. Although at times the dialogue can be overworked, the rewarding passages artfully capture love confronting the region’s unavoidable ethnic and national stigmas.
An uneven portrait of difficult love.Pub Date: June 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470113469
Page Count: 352
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Haphazard and undemanding.
A sports agent’s first official client is the man she dumped years ago in college.
After two years of hard work as an underling, Nora Mackenzie is finally being promoted to full-time sports agent. She’s worked hard, kept quiet, and allowed men in the office to call her Mac—a nickname she hates—all to show she’s a team player and “one of the guys.” Unfortunately, her boss instructs her to sign Derek Pender, a football player coming off an injury, who happens to be the man she heartlessly dumped in their senior year of college. Derek signs with her for revenge, seeing it as his opportunity to pay Nora back for callously breaking his heart eight years earlier. He insists she be at his beck and call: answering his emails, running his errands, cooking dinner for his dates. He also refuses to let her explain why she broke up with him without warning or explanation. Nora feels she has no choice but to acquiesce to Derek’s humiliating demands, since she’s worked too hard to let him ruin her dream job. She hopes he’ll thaw and they might become friends, but Derek’s bad behavior is designed to hide the fact that he’s still in love with her. Nora’s characterization is uneven, veering between anger at how she’s treated in the male-dominated field to immature bickering and bantering with Derek. Although Adams likely meant for Derek and Nora’s interactions to have an enemies-to-lovers vibe, the characters instead seem juvenile and stuck in the past. The novel is fueled by a string of tropes—second chance romance! married in Vegas! only one bed!—each randomly deployed to keep the book going despite thin characterization and wan plotting.
Haphazard and undemanding.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593723678
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.
A vampire and an Alpha werewolf enter into a marriage of convenience in order to ease tensions between their species.
As the only daughter of a prominent Vampyre councilman, Misery Lark has grown accustomed to playing the role that’s demanded of her—and now, her father is ordering her to be part of yet another truce agreement. In an effort to maintain goodwill between the Vampyres and their longtime nemeses the Weres, Misery must wed their Alpha, Lowe Moreland. But it turns out that Misery has her own motivations for agreeing to this political marriage, including finding answers about what happened to her best friend, who went missing after setting up a meeting in Were territory. Isolated from her kind and surrounded on all sides by the enemy after the wedding, Misery refuses to let herself forget about her real mission. It doesn’t matter that Lowe is one of the most confounding and intense people she’s ever met, or that the connection building between them doesn’t feel like one born entirely of convenience. There’s also the possibility that Lowe may already have a Were mate of his own, but in spite of their biological differences, they may turn out to be the missing piece in each other’s lives. While this is Hazelwood’s first paranormal romance, and the book does lean on some hallmark tropes of the genre, the contemporary setting lends itself to the author’s trademark humor and makes the political plot more easily digestible. Misery and Lowe’s slow-burn romance is appealing enough that readers will readily devour every moment between them and hunger to return to them whenever the story diverts from their scenes together.
Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593550403
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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