Like all the best fairy tales: nostalgic with an undercurrent of darkness.
Three lost souls search for a missing woman.
When best friends Ralph “Rafe” Howell and Jeremy Cox were teenagers, they went missing in the woods of West Virginia for six months. Now, 15 years later, the two are estranged. Rafe lives in a cabin and spends his days hunting, painting, and being generally hermitic. Jeremy has an uncanny, almost supernatural ability to find lost people, and spends his time finding lost girls. Enter Emilie Wendell. Emilie’s adoptive mother recently died and, in her search to ease her loneliness, Emilie uploaded her DNA to a website that matched her with a half-sister she didn’t know existed. Here’s the catch: Emilie’s sister, Shannon Yates, went missing years ago in the same forest as Rafe and Jeremy. Emilie shows up to a TV interview Jeremy is doing and demands he help find her sister. Jeremy agrees and reveals a secret: Shannon, better known to him as Skya, is the queen of a magical land called Shanandoah. As it turns out, Jeremy and Rafe weren’t lost in the woods those many years ago but were spending their days galivanting around the secret magical kingdom whose entrance is in the forest. To return they need to enlist the help of Rafe, whose memories of Shanandoah and, more heartbreakingly, the love he held for Jeremy were erased when they left the magical world. After quite a bit of convincing, Rafe reluctantly agrees to help. What unfolds is an adventure filled with sword fights, romance, and gut-wrenching stories of the dark past that led the boys to the forest in the first place. Shaffer’s depictions of Emilie and Skya fall almost completely flat. That said, she makes up for it with the tender love between Jeremy and Rafe and the magical depiction of the world they once left behind.
Like all the best fairy tales: nostalgic with an undercurrent of darkness.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780593598870
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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