A light but satisfying love story perfect for fans of beer, medicine, and second chances.
A contemporary romance follows a single dad and the self-sufficient doctor who catches his eye while she tries to escape her own checkered past.
Ewens (Exposure, 2017, etc.) opens her tale as Boyd McNaughton, brew master at Foghorn Brewery, attempts to perfect a new flavor of beer. He cuts his hand on a device called a keggle, whereupon he rushes himself to Petaluma Valley Hospital and meets Dr. Ella Walters, a beautiful physician. Days later, Boyd’s teen son, Mason, meets his dad at the hospital when he’s getting his stitches removed. Mason is focused more on his search for love advice about a girl at school than on his father’s injury. When Ella chimes in on the father-son conversation with some romantic tips of her own for Mason, an immediate bond is forged between Ella and the boy, and Boyd’s curiosity is piqued. Following their first meeting, Boyd tries to suppress his interest in Ella, determining that he shouldn’t disrupt the calm life he has built for himself and Mason by introducing a woman into the mix. Unfortunately, it seems as though he is suddenly running into Ella everywhere around town, and it is impossible for him to push her from his thoughts. Ella is wary of Boyd, especially in light of the turbulent relationship she left behind in her hometown of Los Angeles. Even so, she can’t seem to prevent herself from being drawn to Boyd—and Mason too. As Boyd and Ella try to work through their own baggage, the reader can enjoy the ride, watching them wend their ways toward each other. Despite a predictable plot strand, Ewens manages to create page-turning romantic suspense. A seemingly airy tale, the story still tackles many weighty issues, from parental abandonment to the difficulty of establishing lasting interpersonal connections. With a fast-paced narrative and the deft employment of an unlikely couple, a device that seems to have become the author’s hallmark, the book provides an entertaining tale that is as insightful as it is flirtatious.
A light but satisfying love story perfect for fans of beer, medicine, and second chances.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9976838-7-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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