Money corrupts, but love prevails, making it easy to overlook the flaws in this friendship.
Thayer (Island Girls, 2013, etc.) returns to the sunny shores of Nantucket, where two friends from different backgrounds share childhood memories and the same man.
Thayer describes the idyllic shores of Nantucket with cheerful prose: “the sun, fat and buttery as one a child would draw in school,” shines on a sea that “winks blue and turquoise” on the beaches where Emily and Maggie meet every summer to play. Their love for the island may be all the two girls have in common. Emily’s mother, a wealthy New Yorker, wants nothing to do with the islanders—including Maggie, whose mother is a poor seamstress. Though Emily’s mother disappears too often to cause any real friction between the girls, Emily and Maggie realistically grow apart as they go to college, start careers and meet boys. Emily’s romance with Maggie’s brother, Ben, seems doomed when he asks her to downgrade her lifestyle to match his just as rich Cameron Chadwick asks her out on a date. When Emily finds out she’s pregnant, she’s not sure if the baby belongs to Cameron or Ben, but she rolls the dice and tells Cameron it’s his after Ben refuses to answer his phone. It’s debatable whether Emily is acting in the best interest of her child or avoiding responsibility, but her internal struggle is compelling as she tries to keep her unhappy marriage together. Emily might have made a different choice had she known that Cameron impregnated Maggie after a one-night stand. In a maddening twist, Maggie decides not to tell Emily that Cameron fathered her child. We'll never know if Emily would be enraged or pleased that her daughter and Maggie’s might be half sisters. Still, their reunion is sweet when an unexpected tragedy brings Emily back to the island.
Money corrupts, but love prevails, making it easy to overlook the flaws in this friendship.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-54548-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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