by Sonia Taitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2017
The concept of family is expansive in Taitz’s (Down Under, 2012, etc.) latest novel.
A busy lawyer on the partner track finds her life suddenly more difficult to control.
Undeterred by an unplanned pregnancy, Abigail Thomas is still trying to do it all. She's seen what motherhood has done to other promising lawyers, and she refuses to become a statistic. So rather than resting and nesting for her new baby, Abigail is still running around Manhattan, spending hours hunched over volumes in the law library, and hopping on long and shaky flights for her next case. It’s during one of these work sessions that she finds herself quite literally in a rut, having tripped over a pothole on a busy street. Luckily, the handsome Timothy Vail happens to be passing by and is eager to serve as a good Samaritan. What should have merely been a chance encounter with a quick goodbye lasts much longer since Tim refuses to let her go on with her day. He is quickly enamored, much to Abigail’s confusion given her current circumstances. With the baby’s father out of the picture, Abigail tries to give it a go with her overzealous suitor, but her heart isn’t totally in it. When Abigail is asked to work on a case that will take her to Grenada in the West Indies, she jumps at the opportunity to prove that her pregnancy will not deter her from her career. There she meets Evelyn MacAdam, an odd older woman whose property and health have been badly damaged by Abigail’s client. Even though it’s Abigail’s duty to her firm to work against Mrs. MacAdam, she finds that her role as a lawyer isn’t as clear as it once seemed. Taitz demonstrates the hurdles of being a working mother, as well as the rampant sexism for a female lawyer on the partner track, in vivid and cringeworthy detail.
The concept of family is expansive in Taitz’s (Down Under, 2012, etc.) latest novel.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9852227-9-6
Page Count: 425
Publisher: McWitty Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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by Christina Lauren ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018
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
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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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