The heroine is the hook, and she rocks it.
A high-end madam revisits her own difficult past when she decides to follow her dreams and face her ambivalence toward her life choices.
Thirty years after her mother’s death, Desdemona Dean wakes up bored and weary. As a high-end madam, she has every material thing she wants, but nothing makes her happy. She cares about her employees and makes sure they’re safe from violence and legal risk, but the older she gets, the more she wonders why she’s still in the game. Her life is so filled with secrecy she’s never had a friend, and no one knows her real name. “There was no part of her life that felt complete.” When Desi decides to further her education, she connects with Loren, a tutor who’s a decade younger, and she finds herself charmed by his positivity, gratitude, and sense of possibility. They enter into a sexual relationship—which starts when she offers to tutor him with her own expertise—that is ultimately derailed when she convinces herself that their differences are too complicated even as she begins to ask herself what will make her happy and makes life changes influenced by his worldview. As she does, she looks back at her life, honoring her strengths and re-evaluating her measures of success, making choices which may lead her back to love and self-respect. Bryant opens up her book with a young Desi holding a Tickle Me Elmo in 1988, an impossibility since the product launched in 1996 yet a good prop for the scene. Much of the book is like this—not quite perfect yet compelling nonetheless, and where Bryant’s writing sometimes lacks polish, Desi’s thought-provoking backstory and transformation keep the reader engaged and sympathetic.
The heroine is the hook, and she rocks it.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1654-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dafina/Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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