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THE DEARLY DEPARTED

Austen would have approved: astringency with a happy ending.

Another sharply observed, if avowedly romantic, comedy of manners from Lipman (The Ladies’ Man, 1999, etc.), an unreconstructed Janeite.

Sunny Batten gets jolting news from the King George, New Hampshire, police. Her mother has died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, thanks to a faulty furnace. “She and her fiancé didn’t suffer,” the police chief tells her gently over the phone. Sunny—short for Sondra but unreflective of her general outlook on life—is devastated. Though they’d been living apart (college, a series of jobs), she and her mother had always been emotionally close. Or so she’d thought. But when she recovers enough to contemplate something other than her horrific loss, she finds that little in her mother's actual world corresponds to her own idea of it. Fiancé? How could there possibly be such a person when Sunny knew nothing of his existence? In the days that follow she learns much about Margaret Batten that comes as a surprise. Miles Finn, the putative fiancé, had in fact been her mother’s secret lover for well over 30 years. In addition, there is every likelihood that his relationship to Sunny herself was weightier than she had at first been led to believe. And that being the case, certain ancillary conclusions are unavoidable. At the funeral, for instance—the double funeral, that is—Fletcher Finn, son of the deceased Miles, a brash young man only slightly younger than 31-year-old Sunny, materializes—disconcertingly. Which is to say that his resemblance to her is so striking that the assembled King George folks gasp collectively, leaving Sunny to consider the sudden, unnerving possibility of siblinghood. But not every revelation is disquieting. This is Lipman, after all, and the sensitive, kind police chief turns out to be Joey Loach, who sometimes sat behind Sunny—rather yearningly—in high school study hall.

Austen would have approved: astringency with a happy ending.

Pub Date: June 19, 2001

ISBN: 0-679-46312-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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

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SEE ME

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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