A love-at-first-sight romance livened up by a complicated heroine and engaging historical detail.
In Hall’s (Journey of Promise, 2013, etc.) romance/thriller, a woman with an unhappy past starts over in 1945 Nebraska.
Bonnie Cooper leaves San Diego in a hurry, taking only one suitcase—and a small red leather box holding “the secrets that had her running for her life.” Readers don’t discover the nature of those secrets until quite late in the novel, nor the full story of why Bonnie lies compulsively about herself and her origins. (“It had always been easier to pretend to be someone else,” thinks Bonnie, “someone better than her real self.”) Attractive and eager to learn, Bonnie soon settles into Omaha, and her pet kitten and new friends help stem her chronic panic attacks. When she meets the kind Orton family—and their handsome nephew Glen, newly returned from war—Bonnie thinks her secrets are safe. She and Glen fall in love at top speed, but their respective painful memories bring them together in a believable way. Hall creates an intriguing, ambiguous heroine in Bonnie; her willingness to lie, even to people who care about her, or use her good looks to gain favors, may raise doubts in readers’ minds even as they find her sympathetic. Her secret, once revealed, is surprising, historically appropriate, and makes sense of Bonnie’s panic. However, readers may find it implausible that she wouldn’t have destroyed the contents of her box long ago, since they hold no sentimental value and could only serve to harm her. That said, the red box serves as a reminder that the past is never really over until one faces it squarely.
A love-at-first-sight romance livened up by a complicated heroine and engaging historical detail.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479330546
Page Count: 392
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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