A fun, often humorous, escapist tale that will have readers blushing, laughing and rooting for its characters.
In the second book in Summers’ (Break in Two, 2013) romance series, worlds and hearts collide when a single mother from Colorado meets a wealthy Parisian playboy.
Safely ensconced in his Paris penthouse, Luc Chevelier has a thriving business career and love-’em-and-leave-’em womanizing ways that provide him with an uncomplicated life. In Boulder, Colorado, up-and-coming wedding photographer Megan Sullivan has been raising her 6-year-old son, Elliott, on her own for the past five years, after her ex-husband chose his drug addiction over his family. Despite prodding from her mom and best friend, Megan refuses to enter the dating world, convinced that she already has all she needs for the perfect life. When Megan takes a trip to Paris and meets Luc, sparks fly, but both have guarded natures and fears of heartbreak. However, after an agreeable night of passion, they realize that despite their initial intentions, their lives will never be the same again. Following a tried-and-true formula, Summers brings forth two more cautious people navigating the choppy waters of love. Although the concept and plot are slightly predictable, the story moves forward at a pleasing pace that’s quite engaging. Summers particularly does a great job of handling sex scenes, keeping them steamy yet respectably plausible (“Luc slid his hand up her shirt to her breasts. He let his fingertips graze the outline of her lacy bra, feeling goosebumps form on her flesh as he touched her”). The main characters’ coupling seems like a long shot, but it’s one that die-hard romance fans will expect. Overall, Summers renders the two main characters in a believable and often relatable manner. Megan, for example, initially comes off as a no-nonsense mom type, but she soon drops her reservations and inhibitions to unleash the desirable woman inside. Although plots twists involving miscommunication, bad timing and devious third-party machinations may sometimes be frustrating, they’re not unexpected, and they lead to a satisfying conclusion.
A fun, often humorous, escapist tale that will have readers blushing, laughing and rooting for its characters.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Gretz Corp
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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