An erotic, if occasionally frustrating, guilty pleasure about a suspicious wife.
A newlywed’s blissful marriage becomes clouded by secrets from her husband’s past.
In Eglington’s (Beckham 101, 2016, etc.) sequel, Kate Quinn can hardly believe her good fortune. A dedicated nurse, she spent seven years in a comfortable, if unfulfilling, relationship with her first boyfriend, Scott Lawton. When she discovers his infidelity, she ends the liaison only to discover his friend Robert Beckham has wanted to date her for the past six years. They fall in love and marry in Las Vegas just days later. After a whirlwind honeymoon, they return home and start planning their family. Robert wants nothing more than to keep Kate secure, insisting that she quit her job and check in with him while he’s at work. He even accompanies her to the gynecologist to find out when it is safe for her to conceive. When they travel to Ireland and England to meet Robert’s family, including his mother, Emma, and father and stepmother, Richard and Sylvia, she discovers he may be harboring a few secrets. A violent fight at an Irish pub, intimations of illicit undercover work, and a frosty relationship with Sylvia all hint at a dark side to Robert. What will Kate risk in order to uncover the truth? Eglington’s sequel enlarges her storytelling canvas by introducing Kate’s and Robert’s extended families and wide circle of friends; however, the character development remains uneven. Although the sex scenes between Kate and Robert continue to provide erotic sizzle, the novel truly succeeds when the focus shifts to their interactions with their respective families, particularly Robert’s relationship with his divorced parents. Emma and Richard are strong supporting characters, and their continued attraction to each other is touching and bittersweet. Despite the book’s strong elements, Eglington misses an opportunity to fully explore some of Kate’s choices. Kate willingly gives up her career and freedom only to realize that she doesn’t even know how much Robert makes a year. She’s so naïve at times that some readers may agree with her friend Pepper’s astute observation that the marriage was “not thought through fully.”
An erotic, if occasionally frustrating, guilty pleasure about a suspicious wife.Pub Date: March 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5144-7276-7
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.
Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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