A fairly standard romance bolstered by intriguing characters and a lush setting.
A young woman finds herself drawn into the seductive world of the Hamptons in Murray and Fahrie’s novel.
Lindsey is a 30-year-old New Yorker working at a PR firm. Her life is turned upside down one night when a man follows her home and assaults her in her apartment. If not for the quick action of a friendly neighbor and his vicious guard dog, Lindsey would have been raped or worse—but the event still leaves its mark. She flees the city to her aunt’s country house in Westchester, hoping to recover, finding it impossible to return to Manhattan. (“My shiny Big Apple wonderland had shriveled up like a piece of dried fruit,” she muses.) When her ex-boyfriend Karl Tuck proposes that she follow him back to Southampton, Lindsey is hesitant to fall back into bad habits with the seductive and smug Karl, but he assures her that their relationship will be all business as he works to mount a festival for the Hamptons’ wealthy elite and provides her with an excuse to stay out of the city. As the two find themselves in the office together, Lindsey can’t help but wonder how long it will be before she’s be back in his bed as well. (“He was an addiction and I was an addict in danger of slipping back because I’d returned to the old bad neighborhood too soon,” she thinks as passionate memories consume her thoughts.) Lindsey tries to focus instead on her kooky neighbor, Jasmine Fournier, a wild free spirit who shops at vintage stores and seems to know everyone in town. She confesses to Linsdey early on that she has a secret, but as with the Hamptons setting itself, it will take Lindsey time to fully understand all the intricate details. She immerses herself in the world of the wealthy and the region’s unique history, hoping to bring a touch of art and culture to Karl’s festival. Along the way, she encounters the enigmatic Colin Preston; as Lindsey struggles to sort out her feelings, she also finds herself drawn to the handsome stranger and his eccentric Hamptons family.
The Hamptons provide a breathtaking backdrop for a romance, and they lend the narrative a softer, more inviting ambiance through Lindsey’s thoughtful focus on history and nature—it’s a nice contrast to the glitz and glamour that readers might expect. The harmony of the beaches has an uneasy undertone to it, however; Lindsey’s attack is so vivid and brutal that readers will be expecting monsters or murders behind every sand dune, a tension that clashes with the much gentler, conventional romantic stakes the book eventually settles into. Lindsey’s memories of passionate hotel room nights with Karl are steamy enough to keep pulses racing, and Jasmine is a fabulous creation bringing fun, mystery, and vulnerability to the proceedings. (In one of the book’s best moments, when Jasmine learns her beloved employer is on his deathbed, she rushes immediately in the opposite direction to steal his book collection, howling, “I won’t let this opportunity slip through my fingers. Not this time. Yes! Yes! I deserve everything.”) Lindsey herself is a strong heroine—her flaws and weakness for Karl’s muscles included. Fans of the romance genre might not uncover any major surprises following her around the ritzy world of the Hamptons, but she still offers them a lot to love.
A fairly standard romance bolstered by intriguing characters and a lush setting.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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