A wholesome and uplifting tale of second chances and gourmet mac and cheese, perfect for romantic foodies.
A novel offers a contemporary romance about a young, widowed mother who surprises herself when she starts to fall for her brother’s longtime best friend.
Ewens (Taste: A Love Story, 2015, etc.) introduces heroine Makenna Rye Conroy five years after her husband’s untimely death. Makenna is raising their daughter on her own and making ends meet by working in her brother’s trendy California restaurant, known as The Yard. She finally feels that she has gotten her life back to a stable, comfortable place where she can relax and focus on her daughter. Yet one night she experiences an unsettling dream about her brother’s closest friend, Travis McNulty, and suddenly, her focus shifts almost entirely to him. While Makenna manages the finances at the restaurant, Travis, one of the head chefs, exhibits a talent and passion for exquisite dishes. Despite the fact that she has worked side by side with Travis for quite some time, his appearance in her dreams makes her wonder if her mild attraction to him actually runs deeper. The reader learns that Travis has a long-held hankering for Makenna, but he never fancied the feelings would be returned. When he finally sees an opening into Makenna’s life, he doesn’t want to let the opportunity pass. As she and Travis grow closer, Makenna worries that their relationship will upset the delicate balance she has finally achieved between toiling at the restaurant and raising her daughter. Through many compelling scenes at the restaurant, Makenna’s family farm, and even the fussy private school her daughter attends, Ewens shows the central couple dancing in circles around each other for much of the tale. All the while, the author peppers the book with unique details about the restaurant where the pair works, the trendy and singular dishes served, and the quirky clientele. The story’s pacing is fast and engaging, and romantic suspense should keep readers turning pages. Although readers will likely predict the tale’s outcome, the couple’s journey is worth following.
A wholesome and uplifting tale of second chances and gourmet mac and cheese, perfect for romantic foodies.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9908571-7-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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