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
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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