A perceptive, ghostly tale about two lovers struggling to find their way.
The death of a close high school friend haunts a young couple in this debut novel.
Autumn Miller is working as a waitress at a restaurant in a small town, and it is her last day. She has spent the last few years saving money and has decided to go back to school. After a run-in with some terrible customers, she leaves work early but soon learns that the college has delayed her academic program until the following spring. Now that she is unemployed and won’t start school for eight more months, Autumn decides to take some money she inherited from her grandmother and buy an old farmhouse. Jensen Owens, a guy that Autumn was close to in high school, arrives in town, but she doesn’t immediately recognize him. Several years have passed, and Jensen has been drinking a lot and going from woman to woman, but something has called him back to his hometown. After reintroducing himself to Autumn, he ends up back at her place after she gets drunk at a bar one night. Autumn is in a relationship with a guy named Logan, but he is often absent, and Jensen soon takes his place. Autumn and Jensen share a traumatic memory that has linked them forever. Their good friend Jake died when they were in high school, and both Autumn and Jensen are wracked by feelings of guilt and horror concerning this tragedy. As Jensen’s battle with alcoholism comes to a head, visions of Jake start to haunt both him and Autumn. She has to decide whether she can save Jensen, should set him free, or perhaps both. Rose has written a sensitive story about fairly young people who are trying to rebuild their lives. The novel excels at showing how they wrestle with their personal demons, which in Jensen’s case have become all-consuming. The eerie, ghostly appearances of Jake add a different level to the tale, as the author tries to dissect the forces that lead people to do destructive things (“Jensen shook his head but Jake did not disappear. He would forever be eighteen years old with the same flyaway mussed brown hair”). Ruminations about feelings can slow things down a bit, but Rose has created a convincing setting with enough room for romance and a touch of the supernatural.
A perceptive, ghostly tale about two lovers struggling to find their way.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5170-6140-1
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.
An analysis of our emotions and the skills required to understand them.
We all have emotions, but how many of us have the vocabulary to accurately describe our experiences or to understand how our emotions affect the way we act? In this guide to help readers with their emotions, Brackett, the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents a five-step method he calls R.U.L.E.R.: We need to recognize our emotions, understand what has caused them, be able to label them with precise terms and descriptions, know how to safely and effectively express them, and be able to regulate them in productive ways. The author walks readers through each step and provides an intriguing tool to use to help identify a specific emotion. Brackett introduces a four-square grid called a Mood Meter, which allows one to define where an emotion falls based on pleasantness and energy. He also uses four colors for each quadrant: yellow for high pleasantness and high energy, red for low pleasantness and high energy, green for high pleasantness and low energy, and blue for low pleasantness and low energy. The idea is to identify where an emotion lies in this grid in order to put the R.U.L.E.R. method to good use. The author’s research is wide-ranging, and his interweaving of his personal story with the data helps make the book less academic and more accessible to general readers. It’s particularly useful for parents and teachers who want to help children learn to handle difficult emotions so that they can thrive rather than be overwhelmed by them. The author’s system will also find use in the workplace. “Emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace—as they are in every human endeavor,” writes Brackett. “They influence everything from leadership effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations.”
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-21284-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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