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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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