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Too Hot To Handle

Name: Too Hot To Handle
Author: Susan Arden

From the Bad Boys (Zero to 60) series , Vol. 10

by Susan Arden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 2016

A sometimes-entertaining cowboy romance, undone by the age gap between its main characters.

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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

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.