A sexy, elegantly crafted debut.
After discovering her husband has been unfaithful, a politician’s wife revisits her life choices and everything she gave up for her husband’s career.
Rachel is the perfect wife to Matt Abbott, the mayor of Oasis Springs, a fictional town near Washington, D.C. During Matt’s 40th birthday party, he sends her a racy photograph of himself. It’s so out of character that she instantly realizes the text was meant for someone else and her husband is having an affair. Having met Matt at a difficult time in her life, she was initially content to put aside her dreams of a career in art photography in order to play her role as the White politician’s Black trophy wife. Over time, having forsaken her ambition in favor of her husband’s weighs more heavily on her, and his infidelity makes her sacrifices feel all the more painful. She strikes a deal with him that she will remain in their marriage, playing up to the press for the remainder of his current campaign, provided she gets the house and $1 million at its conclusion. When she meets Nathan Vasquez, a fellow artist who reawakens her old passions, she’s suddenly not so sure she can wait out the remainder of her sentence with Matt. As Rachel begins a steamy affair with Nathan, she worries she’s jeopardizing her daughter’s financial future and her own reputation. Told in an engaging, close third-person narrative, the book alternates between Rachel’s and Nathan’s perspectives. While it is obvious almost immediately that there will be an affair between them, there is joy and suspense in watching it unfold. The way the author manages to center their passion for each other around art is clever and engaging. Teeming with complicated family dynamics and the negative aspects of media attention, the novel also examines the difficulty of being in the public eye. The author also explores the complexities of interracial marriage with a perspective that feels fresh and insightful.
A sexy, elegantly crafted debut.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781538722770
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
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
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