A modern love story with an absorbing, unique take on May-December relationships.
A 40-year-old widow falls for her 23-year-old neighbor in this debut contemporary romance.
In her first foray into fiction, Coventry presents a sympathetic heroine confronted by forbidden love. Samantha Sullivan lives alone in suburban Michigan, where she’s been quietly grieving her deceased husband for nearly five years. But when her attractive, young neighbor Jason Grant returns to his parents’ house from college for the summer, she’s stunned by his good looks. As they chat over the backyard fence, she feels the first stirrings of her libido since before she lost her husband. She tries to laugh off her fantasies about the much younger man, but it quickly becomes clear that Jason feels an attraction to her, too. With wisdom well beyond his tender years, he convinces her that she should give their budding relationship a chance. The two quickly become close during a series of very private and steamy dates. However, Sam is frightened about how others will perceive their relationship and tries to keep it secret despite Jason’s objections. When he finally tells his parents about Sam, his mother gives her a cold reception, which Sam interprets as a harbinger of what’s to come. Sam soon attempts to extricate herself from the relationship, pushing Jason to accept an internship in Denver that could result in a permanent job. Although she thinks she’s falling in love with him, her fear of social rejection may prevent them from ever having a chance. As Coventry describes the complex issues of age and love that Jason and Sam must navigate, she also touches on other weighty topics, such as grief, friendship, and emotional renewal. She tells the story at a fast clip, building the suspense in a way that will keep even the most experienced romance fans engaged. The story artfully explores the difficulties inherent in unconventional relationships without skimping on steamy sex scenes. Although the tale’s trajectory is somewhat predictable, readers should enjoy Coventry’s witty narrative style, complex characters, and knack for flirtatious dialogue.
A modern love story with an absorbing, unique take on May-December relationships.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-64822-3
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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