A pleasing cross-genre novel.
A novel that mixes Scottish history, an ancient curse, and a hint of romance.
After her fiance breaks up with her via text, Aubrey Cumming finds herself at a loss. After all, she moved from Pennsylvania to the town of Harrington, New Jersey, for him. After a pity party with two of her friends, she returns to work at her bookstore job. There, her Scottish boss, Angus MacKintosh, offers her a trip to Scotland to visit the land of her ancestors and get over her ex. Her boss even found her a place to stay for free, with just one catch—she’ll have to find a way to break a curse placed on the MacKintosh family back in 1442: “none shall be loved truly, but always in vain.” To break it, a Cumming must fall in love with a MacKintosh. In Scotland, Aubrey takes her time enjoying life as a tourist, but it isn’t long before she meets two strapping Scottish gentlemen, Finn Cameron and Connor MacConnach. But in the wake of Brexit, Scotland is still fighting for its independence from the United Kingdom, and the Caledonia First campaign has powerful enemies as well as a traitor in their midst. Author MacKinnon (Whiskey Dreams, 2018, etc.) offers a little something for everyone in this novel, including a love triangle, supernatural elements, political intrigue, dramatic history, and beautiful scenery in a truly epic tale. Aubrey’s time in Scotland is broken up by glimpses of the past, which show how the family curse came about. The well-developed main characters are backed up by a host of entertaining and lovable secondary players. It’s clear the author did her research about the country, history, and landscape, which may cause some readers to do further research, if not book tours of their own. This novel is also highly recommended for fans of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, as its fans will find many hidden and not-so-hidden references to it in the text.
A pleasing cross-genre novel.Pub Date: March 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73383-840-5
Page Count: 356
Publisher: DartFrog Books
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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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BOOK REVIEW
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