Like Francesca’s favorite dulce de leche, an indulgence for readers willing to binge on empty calories.
Travel writer enjoys cuisine, tango and reawakened sensuality in an airbrushed Buenos Aires.
Manhattan foodie and socialite Francesca, a native Neapolitan, is not aging gracefully. Her adult children have left the nest, and her Italian recipes have displaced sexual desire in her marriage; for some time now the only nookie between Francesca and banker husband George has been gnocchi. She’s resigned herself to celibacy (she doesn’t take seriously George’s urging to have an affair) when salvation arrives in the form of a magazine assignment. She’s to do a spread on the tango culture in Buenos Aires with special emphasis on a recent phenomenon: wealthy Brits and Americans who buy Tuck and Tango vacation packages combining plastic surgery and post-operative dance rehab. In Argentina, Francesca enrolls in tango classes, and the dance, a form of stylized intercourse, inflames her long-dormant libido. A target for her lust quickly surfaces in the shape of silver-haired Roberto, 40, a plastic surgeon and entrepreneur who has profited from the T&T trend. The novel tempers the lovers’ steamy grapplings with cool-down sections featuring Francesca’s other Argentinean friends: Ellie, an American singleton on her biennial tango (sans tuck) break; Sarah, a keen observer of Buenos Aires society scandals; Luis, an Adonis who’s risen from the barrio to international tango fame; and Analia, a danseuse who falls hopelessly in love with gay Luis during one of his capricious lapses into heterosexuality. From boudoir to ballroom, memoirist Chen (Rosemary and Bitter Oranges, 2003) displays a flair for sensory detail. However, her fictional characters transcend neither their formulaic roles (frigid epicurean spouse, sexy surgeon, etc.) nor the novel’s wish-fulfilling premise of an older woman emerging from invisibility to object of desire via a simple change of hemisphere. Promising complications—Francesca’s rival for both husband and lover is a billionairess in her 60s—are downplayed as minor blowback.
Like Francesca’s favorite dulce de leche, an indulgence for readers willing to binge on empty calories.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7061-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable...
An unlucky woman finally gets lucky in love on an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii.
From getting her hand stuck in a claw machine at age 6 to losing her job, Olive Torres has never felt that luck was on her side. But her fortune changes when she scores a free vacation after her identical twin sister and new brother-in-law get food poisoning at their wedding buffet and are too sick to go on their honeymoon. The only catch is that she’ll have to share the honeymoon suite with her least favorite person—Ethan Thomas, the brother of the groom. To make matters worse, Olive’s new boss and Ethan’s ex-girlfriend show up in Hawaii, forcing them both to pretend to be newlyweds so they don’t blow their cover, as their all-inclusive vacation package is nontransferable and in her sister’s name. Plus, Ethan really wants to save face in front of his ex. The story is told almost exclusively from Olive’s point of view, filtering all communication through her cynical lens until Ethan can win her over (and finally have his say in the epilogue). To get to the happily-ever-after, Ethan doesn’t have to prove to Olive that he can be a better man, only that he was never the jerk she thought he was—for instance, when she thought he was judging her for eating cheese curds, maybe he was actually thinking of asking her out. Blending witty banter with healthy adult communication, the fake newlyweds have real chemistry as they talk it out over snorkeling trips, couples massages, and a few too many tropical drinks to get to the truth—that they’re crazy about each other.
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable as well as free.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2803-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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