Roemer (Naked in 30 Days, 2016, etc.) and Rose (His Human Slave, 2016, etc.) deliver an erotic romance that features a battle of the sexes between a fitness club owner and a football legend. A romance novel is only as good as its heroine, and recent divorcée Brandy Love doesn’t disappoint. She’s the smart, capable owner of Phenomenal Physiques, a health club whose demands led to the demise of her marriage. Between work, her kids, Sam and Claire, and her tense relationship with her ex-husband, Justin, she has no room for a love life. That is, until beloved high school football coach Rick Morehouse shows up at the gym to assist with some physical therapy for one of his star players and Brandy invites him to dress as Santa Claus for an upcoming charity event. The former Houston Texans quarterback, according to the narration, “had [Brandy’s] panties dampening just from being in sniffing distance,” but she’s determined not to be sucked in by his charm—until a late-night rendezvous in the men’s room leaves them both begging for more. There’s a catch, though: due to Rick’s single-parent upbringing, he has a strict rule against dating single mothers. Set in Houston, the novel has a definite Friday Night Lights vibe, depicting a world where football reigns; for example, Brandy and Justin are at odds about Sam’s desire to play on the high school football team, Rick is the subject of many a local sports column, and a playoff game serves as the book’s climax. The conservative setting also allows the characters to challenge traditional values. The sex scenes are as spicy as a bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce; Brandy’s agency is always respected, and she gives just as good as she gets. Outside of the bedroom (or weight room or whatever the case may be), Brandy muses on the meaning of being a woman, wife, and mother. Indeed, for a romance novel, it addresses nonromantic matters in some detail, as in a plotline involving Brandy’s friend Meg navigating a career change. On the whole, the book benefits from the dual authorship of first-time novelist Roemer and romance veteran Rose. It’s well-crafted and polished, speaking to Rose’s experience, while also offering Roemer’s fresh voice and point of view. A sexy tale for modern women that’s as steamy as a locker room shower.
Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62601-325-4
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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