For wonderful period details, a tender love story, and frontier humor, this continuing saga is highly recommended.
In this second volume of her Irish Blessings series, novelist Williams (Walls for the Wind, 2016, etc.) focuses on Irish immigrant Devin Cavanaugh and biracial saloonkeeper Dulcinetta Jackson as they make lives for themselves in the Wyoming Territory.
Construction on the Union Pacific has moved on. In fact, the golden spike has finally been hammered in. Devin, raised an orphan and street urchin in New York City, has thus lost his railroad job and now works for a freight outfit out of Bryan City. One of the regular delivery routes for him and mule skinner Caleb Wilson is to South Pass City in gold mining country. One soggy morning, they are forced to take Luther Brandingham III, a young passenger who, they will find out, is Dulcinetta Jackson’s son. Devin is smitten the moment he sets eyes on the comely Dulcie. She owns the freighting business and learned canny business skills from her aunt and mentor, Lou Schering. Seeing Caleb as the grifter and drunkard that he is, she makes Devin the boss, Caleb the underling. A very sore loser, Caleb enlists some Sioux to ambush the next freight run. Almost everything is lost, and Devin barely survives. But Caleb isn’t done. He confronts Dulcie at gunpoint. What happens then shows a Dulcie who is almost preternaturally calm and crafty. Anyway, times are changing, and Devin and Dulcie move to Bryan City to begin a new chapter in their lives. Other characters needing mention are Xiang Ju, Dulcie’s stiff-necked servant, and Ailis Tierney, Devin’s friend from the orphan days, and perhaps we haven’t seen the last of them. Williams writes quite well and is very good at detailing that time and place and making us root for Devin and Dulcinetta. Dulcinetta especially is a marvelous creation, and her confrontation with that fool Caleb is alone worth the price of admission. And the way Luther takes to Devin and vice versa is heartwarming.
For wonderful period details, a tender love story, and frontier humor, this continuing saga is highly recommended.Pub Date: May 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-987767-26-1
Page Count: 178
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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