A sensual novel about a painter, sparkling with mythological details.
In this debut romantic fantasy, a widow tries to choose between a family man and a globe-trotting teacher, unaware that an ancient predator stalks her.
Painter Tess Morgan lost her husband, Meyer, in a car accident five months ago. She and her 5-year-old daughter, Abby, live in the hauntingly wooded town of Carlisle, in Ontario, Canada. One day, while meeting with Abby’s kindergarten teacher, Tess waits for her friend Thomas, another single parent. Instead, she runs into Carlisle newcomer Bryce Waters, who’s there to meet his niece. Later, in a cafe, Tess experiences a vision of a woman being ravished by a tattooed man with needlelike teeth. The woman, Tess learns, is a local named Sonia MacKinnen who’s been missing for days. That she was recently seen with Bryce doesn’t stop Tess from going to a Halloween party at his lavish estate. She attends dressed as Tuatha Dé Danaan, an Irish fairy, and is smitten when Bryce, a traveling anthropology teacher, can converse about the mythological beings that she paints. Unsurprisingly, when Thomas and Bryce meet at a kindergarten Christmas pageant, they instantly dislike each other. Their competition for Tess sets off an avalanche of revealed secrets that tie the artist to the ancient people of Lemuria—and to the horrifying man from her vision. With a generous wit that readers should savor, Willson presents Tess as a damaged woman desperate to heal. She describes Tess’ childhood with a bipolar mother as “an endless roller coaster of maxed-out credit card highs and Titanic-worthy lows.” The author also spreads her love and knowledge of ancient civilizations on nearly every page. As Thomas and Bryce argue the merits of believing in Atlantis, readers learn that “Troy was myth until 1871, when a German archaeologist discovered it under layers of mountains in Turkey.” The narrative also tackles reincarnation, asking if whether, before humans appeared, souls existed in dinosaurs. In the final third, the point of view changes, somewhat telegraphing where characters might stand in the end. Yet as Willson unfurls more of her world, her series’ immense potential proves irresistible.
A sensual novel about a painter, sparkling with mythological details.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-925296-16-7
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Driven
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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