Kirkus
Reviews –
Though
the plot finds a man in early middle age coming to terms with the death of his
wife, the tone of this whimsical fable is so light that it practically floats
off the page. Some might consider the latest from Tyler (Noah's Compass, 2010,
etc.) typically wise and charming, while others will dismiss it as cloying. She
employs a first-person narrator, a 36-year-old man named Aaron, who works for a
small-family publishing firm that specializes in its Beginners series.
"These were something on the order of the Dummies books, but without the
cheerleader tone of voice," explains Aaron, who proceeds to offer the sort
of insight that could come from almost any Tyler novel: "Anything is
manageable if it's divided into small enough increments, was the theory, even
life's most complicated lessons." At the start of the book, Aaron is in
the beginning stages of mourning, after a tree crashed through his house and
crushed his slightly older wife. She was a doctor; Aaron is
"crippled" and something of an oddball. As Tyler's readers recognize,
we are each of us crippled and oddball, deep down inside, and the fact that
Aaron's was a marriage of misfits makes it no different from any other. Early
on, Aaron receives visits from his dead wife, whom no one else can see, and
whom he admits might well be a projection or an apparition. If he is an
unreliable narrator, he is also a flawed one, often sounding more like a much
older woman than like a man his age (very few of whom use terms like
"busy-busy"). Mourning is both a rite of passage and a process of
discovery for Aaron, who early worries that, "I can't do this…I don't know
how. They don't offer any courses in this; I haven't had any practice,"
but who is ultimately not a tragic but comic figure, one who will (more or
less) live happily ever after. An uncharacteristically slight work by a major
novelist.
Kirkus
Reviews –
Another
stand-alone suspenser that rams home the point that there's no such thing as an
ex-mother. Pharmaceutical rep William Skyler blamed his divorce on his wife,
Dr. Jill Farrow. He told his daughters, Victoria and Abby, that Jill had
cheated on him and forbade them to keep in touch with her or her own daughter
Megan. Now, three years later, William is dead, overdosed on prescription
medications Abby is convinced he didn't take himself. What's Jill supposed to
do when Abby drives unannounced to the home she shares with diabetes researcher
Sam Becker, drunk, weeping hysterically and begging for help? Nothing,
maintains Sam, who tells Jill that she's choosing continuing loyalty to Abby
(and to Victoria, who makes it witheringly clear at William's funeral that she
still wants nothing to do with Jill) over her commitment to him and his son
Steven. Nothing, say the Philadelphia police, who insist that William's death
was no homicide. Nothing, Jill's penny-pinching medical-practice manager Sheryl
Ewing says--or would surely say if Jill, already playing out a losing hand in
office politics, ever brought it up to her. Naturally, Jill, protesting,
"What's a mother, or a stepmother?...Isn't it forever?," takes it
upon herself to investigate anyway. Scottoline backs her increasingly beset
supermom ("It wasn't a juggling act, it was a magic act") into sleuthing mode with
practiced expertise, giving her exactly the right motivations and
qualifications for the specific questions she asks. And there'll be a lump in
every throat when Abby disappears and when Jill fights to diagnose a baby who
keeps getting ear infections. As usual with Scottoline, though, the
complications are a lot more satisfying than the windup, in which reason and
plausibility take a back seat to tearful family affirmations. Connoisseurs of
mother love imperiled will prefer Save
Me (2011).
But it would be a mistake to count Scottoline out; she's sure to be back next
year with another dose that might be even more potent.
Kirkus
Reviews –
A
psychic spinster meets her match in a dark, equally gifted stranger, in Quick's
Ladies of Lantern Street series launch. Evangeline, of good breeding but
approaching 30 and penniless, is deemed unmarriageable by Victorian society,
but luckily she has not had to enter service or support herself as a governess.
She is a paid companion, but for a most exclusive and remunerative agency,
Flint & Marsh, which deploys clairvoyants as private eyes to the moneyed
classes. Undercover in her dowdy disguise, Evangeline recently completed her
latest assignment: exposing as a fortune hunter a young man, Douglas, who was
courting an heiress. However, Evangeline wasn't expecting Douglas to exact
revenge. (The two were not unacquainted in the past.) When she's forced to use
psychic power to immobilize him, resulting in his death, Flint & Marsh
sends her to a country cottage to recuperate (where she can devote some time to
writing the melodramatic novels which are her real passion, at least until her
landlord, Lucas Sebastian, comes along). When a London thug, Hobson, breaks into
the cottage, knife at the ready, Evangeline manages to escape to Crystal
Gardens, the mansion newly purchased by Lucas. As Lucas and his hired man Stone
deflect the threat by luring Hobson into a menacing maze of carnivorous
greenery, Evangeline cannot deny the powerful pull Lucas exercises on her, in
both the paranormal and sensual realms. All too soon, however, an invasion of
his relatives dampens the budding romance, as Lucas and Evangeline try to
contain their ardor long enough to solve several mysteries—e.g., who murdered
the former master of Crystal Gardens, Lucas' Uncle Chester, a reputed madman
whose botanical experiments have run amok in the gardens? Who hired Hobson to
kill Evangeline? Is there really Roman treasure buried on the estate? These questions
are overshadowed by the book's main focus: ensuring that the course of true
love is strewn with as many obstacles, psychic and otherwise, as possible.
Delivers all that Quick fans swoon over.
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