A frankly erotic and delicately soulful saga about passion rekindled.
An aging artist reconnects with an elderly muse in this December-December romance.
Single and pushing 70, retired British art professor Alex James barely recognizes the gray, wrinkled form that greets him whenever he looks in the mirror. One day, he glimpses an attractive, red-haired woman in a shop and recognizes her as Samantha Reagan, a woman he knew and longed for 40 years ago, when she had a rich husband who dabbled in the art scene. Now she’s divorced, and it turns out that she fancied him back when he was an enfant terrible with flowing dark locks; she now considers the older version of Alex a silver fox. Alex woos Samantha with trips to the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at London’s Tate museum and with increasingly intimate sketching sessions that escalate to topless posing after her bath; thence to bed, which goes well despite performance glitches. Their appetites whetted, Samantha and Alex attend a “tantra festival” to hear lectures on the spiritual benefits of hourslong sex sessions; Alex duly experiments with new methods that culminate in Richter-scale climaxes: “her body, unable to breathe, incapable of coherent speech, lifted in rigid torment, waited, waited and then cried out savagely and strangely, body moving frantically against the thick air, breath gasping, legs shaking, like a drowning soul in a hot, heaving sea.” Their carnal bliss is complicated by Alex’s fear of commitment, which stems from his having never met two children whom he fathered out of wedlock and whose mother gave up for adoption. It’s further complicated when a woman contacts him, claiming to be his long-lost daughter—a revelation that raises Samantha’s suspicions and leads to buried secrets.
Over the course of this novel, Tappenden, the author of Pegasus to Paradise (2013), crafts a cleareyed exploration of the less often explored topic of physical love among the aged that’s bawdy and sometimes graphic but also psychologically nuanced. It probes Alex’s and Samantha’s sexual yearnings and their self-consciousness about their bodies. It also highlights the prickly wariness they have about opening their lives to each other and the conflict that causes when they also feel like lovestruck teenagers. Alex expresses hope and delight—he imagines himself as a latter-day Rhett Butler or a “geriatric James Bond”—but he also feels stripped of the self-possession that he thought his years had earned him: “He had felt like a naïve little boy again. Shy, hapless, tongue-tied, hiding his ineptitude behind silly behaviour….You would have thought that by now, he would feel comfortable enough to have a reasonable conversation with an attractive woman.” Tappenden writes in a luminous, open prose style that’s suffused with sensuality: “She had certainly watched him stroking many items as if their feel revealed their beauty or history…and she knew she wanted him to stroke her in the same way, a way beyond mere touching.” The result is an absorbing love story that feels a bit like On Golden Pond as rewritten by D.H. Lawrence.
A frankly erotic and delicately soulful saga about passion rekindled.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-912881-78-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: The Book Guild Ltd
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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