A steamy, sun-drenched California romance with some intriguingly serious undertones.
A reserved and vulnerable West Coast lawyer takes a chance on a stranger.
McAdam’s fiction debut, the first installment of a series, flows along fairly standard romance-novel templates. It opens with its likable California heroine, Santa Barbara attorney Amelia Crowley, in bed with yet another well-intentioned but lackluster lover. She ticks off in her head the list of personal rules she’s recently developed that are meant to reflect her realistic expectations (“Nothing demeaning”; “No submission. I am always in control”) but also signal the toll that her history of deep depression has taken on her personal life. She talks about those factors—her “personal pathological repression”—with her therapist, who echoes her worry that her depression has flattened her healthy sex life and counsels her to take more active steps to reconnect with her own sensuality. That advice is on her mind one morning when she visits Southwinds Coffee in Ventura on her way to court and encounters the shop’s smolderingly sexy owner, dreamy surfer guy Ryan Fielding. The two have instant romantic chemistry and begin flirting almost before Amelia’s first coffee cools, with the main thrust of the rest of the book the unfolding of their relationship. Ryan is practically perfect in every way: loving, gentle, patient, funny, and instantly, puppy-ishly loyal. Amelia is flawed, self-doubting, and emotionally needy, and the two are immediately, wildly compatible—especially in the bedroom, where Ryan’s passion promptly makes Amelia throw her rules out the nearest window. The conventional nature of all this is salvaged by the frank and sometimes-multilayered ways McAdam deals with Amelia’s depression issues; readers are periodically reminded about the kind of hell this character has gone through. And while Ryan’s nearly divine sensitivity and interest (he quickly reveals that he’s lusted after Amelia since they both attended the same high school) might be a sign of narrative insecurity—the story would certainly have been more absorbing if he was anywhere near as flawed as she is—the author does a wonderfully light and engaging job of portraying the development of a friendship alongside the explicit sexual acrobatics.
A steamy, sun-drenched California romance with some intriguingly serious undertones.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-64519-2
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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