Although Baker gives lip service to the needs of children and birth parents, her sympathies clearly lie with her...
The title gives readers a clear idea what they’ll find in British magazine editor Baker’s first novel—chick-lit romance with kids thrown in.
Magazine editor Eve, 32, falls in love with photographer Ian after meeting with him on a story about his wife, a famous journalist whose popular columns chronicled her losing battle against cancer. Now a widower, Ian is devoted to parenting his three kids: 13-year-old Hannah, eight-year-old Sophie and Eve’s avowed favorite, five-year-old Alfie. When Eve moves in, she quickly learns that stepmothering complicates romance, especially when there’s an angry, resentful teenager like Hannah involved. Through her best friend Clare, a never-married single mom of 14-year-old Louisa, Eve is soon meeting at Starbucks with Clare—who hated her own stepmother—and Clare’s younger sister Lily, whose boyfriend has a three-year-old daughter he keeps on weekends. Chinese-American Melanie also joins the women for coffee and support dealing with lovers and children. Divorced from a hedge-fund mogul, Melanie has just begun her own online shopping site and is dating a genuinely sweet man whose ten-year-old daughter she has yet to meet but is already nervously obsessing about. Then there is Mandy, a little older and more working class. Divorced with three adolescent sons at home, Mandy now lives with a man with two teenagers of his own. But the novel’s heart lies with Eve and to a lesser extent Clare. Although Ian is a wonderful father and lover, things fall apart for Eve when she becomes pregnant and he’s not ready to add another child to the mix. Meanwhile Clare, who has built her life around raising Louisa without financial help, hears from Louisa’s father Will for the first time in 14 years. Now a married doctor, Will wants to establish a relationship with the daughter he’s never met, and Clare feels understandably threatened at Louisa’s enthusiastic embrace of Will and his family.
Although Baker gives lip service to the needs of children and birth parents, her sympathies clearly lie with her self-absorbed stepmothers.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-184035-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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