A charming, engrossing story of love lost and eventually found.
A novel about family, personal development, and whether true love can overcome deep-rooted emotional damage.
Kara Malendar is a notoriously tough food critic at the Los Angeles Times who’s proud of her reputation. Her job requires a hard outer shell, and after growing up under public scrutiny as the daughter of a U.S. senator, she’s made sure to build a shell that’s triple-reinforced. But when Kara is assigned a feature on Logan Rye, the owner of popular new restaurant The Yard, she’s terrified that the vulnerable person she’s been hiding beneath all that armor will be exposed. Logan is an earthy, passionate, and benevolent chef who believes in humanely produced food and sustainability. He grew up on his father’s farm, where he now sources much of his restaurant’s produce and meat, and he prides himself on taking care of his family after his mother left them. When Kara shows up at his front door to interview him, he’s worried that the life he worked so diligently to create for himself will crumble. It turns out that they first met in Paris while studying at Le Cordon Bleu for a semester—but there, Logan knew her as “Winnie Parker,” the identity she briefly adopted so she could pretend that she wasn’t living in the fishbowl of high society. Unbeknownst to each other, they were the loves of each other’s lives, and their attraction hasn’t waned. As they reignite their romance, both characters reckon with the family trauma that first drove them apart—and whether or not they can deal with ingrained fears of abandonment and rejection. Ewens (Candidate, 2015, etc.) delivers a story that’s equally sensual and smart. The author volleys deftly between Kara’s and Logan’s perspectives, in both the past and the present, with beautiful pacing, revealing plenty of secrets and cliffhangers along the way. The story is full of richly conceived characters and offers brief glimmers of insight into differences between the sexes. It also depicts a foodie world that’s as authentic and intriguing as the people in it.
A charming, engrossing story of love lost and eventually found.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9908571-5-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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