A John Wayne hero, multiple appreciations of the Colt Model 1911 and a cowboy-gets-the-girl romance in one readable package.
Out in west Texas, Tyler Steele, retired Texas Ranger, wife locked in rehab, must make sense of a life undone.
Martin’s (Where the River Ends, 2008, etc.) latest is a tale of love, loyalty, loss and unexpected reconciliation, topped off by ample violence. Driving through a foggy Texas night, Ty narrowly avoids a collision with a battered station wagon carrying Samantha Dyson and her young daughter Hope. Ty offers help. They are wary and resentful, but Ty gets their clunker running and shepherds them to a truck stop. Ty’s Ranger instincts tell him mother and daughter are running from trouble, a hunch proved true when a rogue San Antonio police officer, once Sam’s lover, attempts a kidnapping. Ty subdues him, but hears, “I’ll hunt you. Find you. Rid you of whatever or whoever you love.” Sam has a sister in New Orleans, and Ty drives them there, but the sister’s gone without a trace. Sam and Hope are in danger, and so Ty, duty and honor incarnate, brings them to his Texas ranch. Told from Ty’s point of view, with Hope’s letters to God offering outside perspective, the narrative covers Ty’s early life with his heroic father, his love for his young son Brodie, the collapse of his world after his wife took up drugs, expensive habits and a lover, and the painful knowledge his marriage failed because of his emotional isolation. Martin writes glowingly about Texas, about Rangers and their ethos, about merciless evil in the world and about the fragile bond between man and woman and the blood bond between father and son. Ty helps Sam escape her pursuer, but the story veers off when Ty’s wife is released from rehab, becoming something of an odd but entertaining hybrid of James Lee Burke's morality tales and Nicholas Sparks' sentimental journeys.
A John Wayne hero, multiple appreciations of the Colt Model 1911 and a cowboy-gets-the-girl romance in one readable package.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0398-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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