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Leave a Mark

A touching and striking modern love story.

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Opposites attract when a troubled tattoo artist lands in a medical resident’s ER in this contemporary romance novel.

Dr. Leland “Lee” Hawthorne, 31, and Wren Blanchard, 25, live near each other in Lafayette, Louisiana, yet they’re worlds apart. He’s finishing his charity hospital residency, and his doctor father, stepmother, and live-in decorator girlfriend, Marcelle, all hope that he’ll transition to a lucrative private practice. She’s a tattoo artist haunted by the fact that she was sexually abused at age 6 by her now-deceased addict mother’s boyfriend. The unlikely couple meet when Wren collapses at her tattoo parlor job with a ruptured cyst and Lee attends to her in the ER. He’s impressed by Wren’s sassy remarks and amazing body art; she’s wary but drawn to his kindness and bright-blue eyes. When Lee later spots Wren waiting for a ride from the hospital, he drives her home. They discover they live near each other and that they both lost their mothers and love fried peach pies. Wren later brings some pies to Lee’s house but runs into Marcelle, so she leaves, hurt that he never mentioned his current relationship during their flickering flirtation. Lee soon breaks things off with bad-fit Marcelle to pursue Wren. The two enjoy amazing sex, but later, Wren’s agony about her past reaches a breaking point, and it’s only further aggravated by Lee’s relatives’ looking askance at her tattoos. By novel’s end, however, Lee stages an intervention to put Wren’s demons to rest. Lafayette resident Fournet (Butterfly Ginger, 2015, etc.) delivers another beautifully drawn novel set among her city’s “Saint Streets,” with particularly lovely shadings of description. Wren’s tattoos are gorgeously detailed, and Lee’s attraction to them—and to the artistic, sensitive heroine—is both understandable and believable. Indeed, Fournet’s celebration of tattoo artistry is the narrative’s most compelling element. That said, the couple’s sex scenes and other romantic interludes, such as bonding over a puppy or going kayaking, are similar to those found in more routine romances. Still, Fournet competently crafts these necessary connecting scenes and weaves in the abuse back story in an appropriate manner. Overall, it’s an engaging effort that lives up to its title.

A touching and striking modern love story.

Pub Date: April 28, 2016

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 330

Publisher: Blue Tulip Publishing

Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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THE NIGHTINGALE

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

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