Conflicts and secrets abound, yet the tension doesn’t quite build, so the eruption of the final crisis seems abrupt and the...
Home after the first year at college—can you keep your secrets hidden?
In Fishman’s (Balancing Acts, 2010) latest, Ruth Wasserman returns home to Alabama to resume lifeguarding and coaching at the local pool with her brother David. Ruth’s friends and family marvel at her freshly skinny body and even ask her to help a neighborhood girl lose weight. A soccer phenom, David has always been the golden child in the Wasserman family. But Ruth and David have secrets. At the pool one day, tragedy strikes: A little girl slips under the water. She is in David’s blind spot, but Ruth leaps into the water, saving the child. What might have been a happy ending quickly unravels into accusations of racism, a threatened lawsuit and an increasingly inscrutable David. Meanwhile, Ruth begins a romance with Chris, one of David’s friends. Swim meets are lost and won. The racism and antisemitism Ruth didn’t notice before becomes clear. The board members strategize to avoid the lawsuit. But Ruth is becoming increasingly suspicious of David. Rumors swirl about his alleged use of drugs, and perhaps he has even dropped out of college. The golden child might not be so golden after all. While the sibling code of silence urges Ruth to keep David’s secrets, she wants to know the truth from his own mouth. David has his own suspicions about Ruth’s dramatic weight loss and her new, strange relationship with food. Even Chris notices that she brushes her tummy as if she were trying to brush it off her body. Trouble looms on the horizon, and soon all the beans will be spilled.
Conflicts and secrets abound, yet the tension doesn’t quite build, so the eruption of the final crisis seems abrupt and the resolution far too easy.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-205984-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thought-provoking look at women of a certain age and the choices they make when they realize their lives aren’t exactly...
In a Marin County neighborhood, four women help each other amid marital strife, personal crises and life-altering epiphanies.
For years, Mill Valley, Calif., neighbors Gerri, Andy and Sonja have started most of their days with a brisk walk, but one early spring morning, Andy has had enough with her younger second husband, and she skips the walk and throws him out. It is a loud, angry event, but it is a long time coming, and it sets off a series of surprising upheavals in the lives of her friends. Gerri takes an unplanned trip to her husband’s office in San Francisco, and a conversation with his co-worker makes her question everything she knew about her marriage. Sonja, dedicated to New-Age strategies for health and wellness, is thrown off balance by Andy’s marital strife, then spirals into life-threatening depression when her husband leaves her. As each woman deals with her own personal crossroad, they are collectively drawn to newcomer BJ, who has never shown interest in socializing before but becomes the fresh new pair of eyes that notices change at crucial moments and steps in to help when help is most needed. Hugely popular romance author Carr (The Wanderer, 2013, etc.) steps into women’s fiction territory with this quietly powerful exploration of friendship, marriage and midlife crisis. The characters are realistic and compelling, facing life after 40 with grace, courage and a fierce interpersonal loyalty that is convincing and inspiring. The storyline sounds familiar, yet Carr handles the plot and characters with a deft hand and enough unique twists that we are invested in the characters’ well-beings, and we are touched by their struggles, especially since we see each of them at their best and their worst.
A thought-provoking look at women of a certain age and the choices they make when they realize their lives aren’t exactly what they expected—or thought they were.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1681-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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