A satisfying, engaging read though lacking Wiggs' typical effortlessness and buoyancy.
When writer Cormac "Mac" O’Neill comes to Bella Vista, Isabel Johansen struggles with her distracting attraction to him while she's planning her sister’s wedding and preparing to open a destination cooking school.
After nearly losing Bella Vista, the family’s idyllic hacienda-style home, and discovering a pile of family secrets—including Tess, a half sister she never knew about who wound up saving the estate—Isabel finally has the resources and support to pursue her dream of opening a cooking school. Completely updating her home to house the school and an elegant events venue, she and Tess have decided to launch the space with Tess’ wedding. It’s a busy summer, made even more complicated by the arrival of Mac, a nomadic writer hired to write their grandfather Magnus’ tragic and triumphant story, which includes his work in the Danish resistance during World War II. Mix in a young, pregnant beekeeper and an arrogant celebrity chef with whom Isabel shares a dark past, and the book has many satisfying elements, as well as the enchanting setting of Bella Vista, which “lived and breathed with the essence of life.” This novel is best-selling author Wiggs' follows-up to The Apple Orchard (2013), which told Tess' story, and though it's compelling, it never achieves the same level of pitch-perfect authenticity. Isabel remains a domestic goddess, but her reasons for not letting Mac in for most of the book become less understandable the longer she fervently hangs on to them, and her abrupt about-faces in the book's last scenes on so many aspects of her life make us wonder why they weren't so obvious much sooner.
Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1448-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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BOOK REVIEW
Women's friendship overcomes the villainy of war in this engaging historical fiction.
When Samantha’s beloved grandmother Marie passes away, her will sends Samantha from her home in Chicago to London, where she learns of Marie’s vivid life during World War II.
Born in Munich, Marie met her two best friends, Nora and Hazel, at a British boarding school. Inseparable, the three women stay together long after graduation. As the secretary to the German Department at Royal Imperial University in London, Marie finds herself drawn to Neil Havitt, an ambitious graduate student eager to make his mark in politics via the Communist Party of Great Britain. Married but distraught over multiple miscarriages, Hazel has found meaningful work as a matchmaker. Nora works in the Air Raid Precautions Department of the Home Office , where she is privy to national secrets. And once Hitler invades Poland, those secrets include plans to intern German nationals. As events in Europe escalate, Kelly (The Light Over London, 2019) deftly threads harbingers of domestic danger into the friends’ lives, first via radio and newspaper, then through suspicions of their associates, and finally converging on Marie. Hazel and Nora risk everything to keep Marie out of the internment camps, but Kelly has strewn villains in every corner: Once Neil drops Marie—how can he have a German girlfriend in this time of war?—can she trust that her visits to Communist Party meetings will remain secret? What of her dissolute cousin Henrik, who is eager to throw Marie out of the house? Will he turn her in to the authorities out of sheer spite? Nora and Hazel are not entirely safe either, especially when it turns out that Hazel set up a wealthy British widow with a German professor—a German professor who is now missing and presumed a Nazi sympathizer. Throughout, Kelly skillfully balances narratives from all three friends’ perspectives, building parallels to Samantha’s own budding romance with Nora’s grandson.
Women's friendship overcomes the villainy of war in this engaging historical fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0779-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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The first in a multicultural #OwnVoices romance series, with an enemies-to-lovers central plot and distinctive supporting...
A workaholic, socially inept Indian-American brain surgeon is caught off guard by her attraction to a Rwandan/Anglo-Indian chef in this rewrite of Pride and Prejudice.
Trisha Raje is a princess whose family prides itself on its aristocratic Indian roots as well as its integration into American life. The Rajes are preparing for their scion’s gubernatorial campaign in the Bay Area when Trisha rejoins them after a period of estrangement (caused by her former college roommate). She and chef Darcy "DJ" Caine meet at a political event and sparks fly, but for all the wrong reasons. While the two try to smooth things over, subsequent encounters exacerbate their hostility and class divide. Yet, as any Austen fan knows, the fallout of their pride and biases will eventually be resolved. Dev (A Distant Heart, 2017, etc.) credibly reworks a beloved novel to include diverse representation, and her use of dual points of view reveals the internal lives of both protagonists. DJ’s love for Indian cooking is also an interesting flip of a more traditional script. But Dev creates equivalents to Regency England partly through a discomfiting choice to valorize Trisha’s royal Indian genes—not only does she descend from ancestors who fought the medieval Islamic Mughal rulers and the British Empire and joined the Indian freedom struggle, her relatives are good royals who practice noblesse oblige (including on visits to Africa) and nurture a household (including a member who is differently abled) and have an upper-class sense of art and music. This complimentary take on the one percent is common in the genre, but what is problematic here is that romanticizing a royal identity normalizes the caste hierarchy still practiced (albeit illegally) in South Asian society, including in the contemporary diaspora. So while this is undoubtedly a charming attempt to weave in Indian history and Maharashtrian culture (and address #MeToo), the novel is limited to a lovely but upper-class Hindu family’s tribulations and triumphs, reiterating a tendency among Indian cultural producers to limit happily-ever-afters to this group.
The first in a multicultural #OwnVoices romance series, with an enemies-to-lovers central plot and distinctive supporting characters whose histories and dramas play out alongside the love story.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283905-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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