Stacy Reiser is a struggling actress contending with a career that’s going nowhere slowly, a dismal love life, and a widowed mother who isn’t going to let the thousands of miles between them keep her from meddling. As much as she loves her mother in an exasperated sort of way, Stacy is glad the nosy…
Letting Go struck me as more of a character study than a plot-driven novel, which was a problem since I didn’t come to like or even care about most of its main characters. It’s the story of four generations of one family: Great-grandmother Wilma, her middle-aged daughter Ellen, Ellen’s daughter Amber, and Amber’s three-year-old daughter…
Emily Miller just ditched her boyfriend, Declan Patrick O’Donnell, a dot-com entrepreneur who posted a pornographic picture of her on the Internet in order to bail himself out of serious financial trouble. The snapshot of her bare bottom is getting four million hits a week, an impressive figure due almost entirely to Emily’s, well, impressive…
I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Barbara Samuel’s A Piece of Heaven. She is a wonderfully talented writer who excels in being able to build a story in such a way that you can see the atmosphere and feel her characters’ emotions. When I read her first hardback, No Place Like Home, I…
I haven’t read a non-humorous, non-romantic work of Women’s Fiction in, oh, about a year. If Fresh Air is a typical example, I’ll likely wait several more years before reading another one. While Charlotte Vale Allen’s latest is written competently enough, the story was too dull to capture my interest. I can sum up the…
Call Waiting covers familiar territory in the Women’s Fiction landscape. It’s well-written and engaging, but other than its Australian setting, there’s really nothing new here. Ally Tasker and Meg Lynch are old friends and fellow art school graduates living unsatisfied lives. Ally is an art teacher at a private school, a job with steady money…
I immediately recognized that Isabel Wolff was an author with a fine sense of the absurd upon reading the proviso at the front Out of the Blue, which advises that “No dogs were harmed in the writing of this book.” And despite the fact that this story about the unraveling marriage of Faith Smith, morning…
A Pair Like No Otha’ is one of those books that’s really hard to grade. There were several things that I really liked about it, but there were several other elements that kept me from enjoyint it as much as I could have. Shemone Waters and Darnell Williams were good friends in high school, but…
Barbara Samuel is a great favorite of many AAR reviewers, and here she again shows why. Her lyrical writing and her real characters create a comforting place for readers to stay a while. Luna McGraw is a recovering alcoholic struggling to fix her life. Her alcoholism allowed her ex-husband to gain custody of her daughter…
“Her isolation, the result of being honest with no one, was beginning to be unbearable… She had never been very good at keeping things to herself, and although she had become a master at it recently, she hated the way it shut her off from other people.” The heroine of Kiss River thinks those words…
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