A sometimes-entertaining cowboy romance, undone by the age gap between its main characters.
In Arden’s (Never Say Never: Zero to 60, 2016, etc.) erotic, romantic tale, a feisty, young rodeo rider falls in love with an Marine veteran while trying to escape her uncle’s threats.
Romance is the last thing that Margo Santero is looking for when she meets former soldier Rod McLemore at an airport. At 18, she has a weighty responsibility on her shoulders; if she doesn’t win her event in the upcoming Southern Cross rodeo, her shady uncle, Axel Campesino, will foreclose on her father’s farm and sell her beloved horse, Apollo. But when she encounters the alluring Rod on her way to her sister’s wedding, she can’t resist him. They both get the shock of their lives when they discover that his cousin is marrying her sister—and that Margo’s nearly 11 years younger than he is. Although Rod initially attempts to keep away from Margo, he can’t help but be drawn back to her again, and during their bouts of verbal and physical sparring, they find themselves coming dangerously close to falling in love. But when Axel threatens to get Rod charged with statutory rape if Margo fails to ride in the championship, she knows that the stakes are higher than ever. Arden’s novel—the tenth in her Bad Boys series—is punctuated by frequent steamy sex scenes, including one of the BDSM variety, and will likely satisfy her loyal readers as well as newcomers who are fans of the genre. Margo and Rod bicker and banter and ultimately can’t keep their hands off each other, and it’s no spoiler to say that love ultimately conquers all. The age difference, however, is distinctly unsettling: Margo turns 18 just before meeting Rod. Arden writes Margo as if she’s a slightly older woman—she may be headstrong, but she lacks teenage naïveté. But there’s still something unpleasant about a grown man thinking about a teenage girl, “One day I’d marry her. Put a baby in her belly, then another. And another.”
A sometimes-entertaining cowboy romance, undone by the age gap between its main characters.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Silver Sprocket Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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