“A fairy tale riddled with minor characters...” from waiting for jules
CHOSE THE WRONG GUY, GAVE HIM THE WRONG FINGER
Harbison, Beth St. Martin’s (384 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 9, 2013 978-0-312-59913-3
A runaway bride, competing brothers, a potential gold digger and a 30-day “reinvent yourself ” challenge provide laughs in this latest from Harbison’s good-girls-making-bad-choices arsenal. Long ago, Quinn almost had it all: She was moments away from marrying Burke Morrison, high school’s sexiest nice guy and heir to a dreamy Virginia horse farm where Quinn would happily live. That is, until Burke’s older brother, Frank, knocked on the vestry door and dropped a bomb: Burke had been cheating on Quinn. The wedding was called off. A few days later (in a blur of rage and misery), she and Frank drove to Vegas, where they engaged in some regrettable intimacy. Ten years later, Quinn is still wondering what went wrong. Why did she trust Frank’s story? Why didn’t she talk it over with Burke? Ironically, she designs wedding dresses and comforts nervous brides, but her own romantic life is stuck in the deep freeze. When Morrison matriarch Dottie comes in to have a wedding dress made, Quinn gets plenty of opportunity to resolve her issues. Although Dottie has reached her golden years (she’s Frank and Burke’s grandmother), she still wants a little romance and has found it in Lyle, a much younger furniture salesman she met online. When they marry, Dottie will sell the farm (this is unbearable to Quinn, since she spun her best fantasies there), and soon, Frank and Burke will be in town to help her pack up—that is if they can’t dissuade her from marrying what they suspect is a gold digger. Best friend Glenn sees the strain Quinn is under and so creates daily challenges (drink all day long, try speed dating, wear a side pony) in hopes of raising Quinn’s courage. With Burke and Frank both in town, Quinn can rehash the past in order to create a future. The question is, which brother will be in it? Amiable, though the manic narrative style can be grating.
WAITING FOR JULES
Houston, Tamara N. Atria (400 pp.) $16.00 paper | Aug. 6, 2013 978-1-4516-9851-0
A cab ride home from the airport gives Jules Sinclair time to reflect. After an argument filled with accusations and recriminations, will Marcus be home? Or has she lost him forever? Houston’s debut novel gives Jules a long cab ride, indeed, through traffic-clogged arteries from LAX to Beverly Hills. She has time to recall much more than Marcus, the dashingly handsome lover whose secrets she isn’t sure she wants to 20
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15 june 2013
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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keep. She met Marcus while interviewing for a glamorous position as PR director for Carly’s, a dinner club owned by Michael, a former model–turned–genius restaurateur. Marcus bewitches her with his alpha-male arrogance, impeccable taste and seductive talents. But before Marcus, there was Tony, the gorgeously dreadlocked but commitment-phobic man whose infidelity (with one of her best friends) drove her across the Atlantic to spend two years in London licking her wounds. And then there was Keith, advertising executive and consummate lover, whose sexual healing of Jules comes to a screeching halt with the revelation of a rather obvious secret. Commiserating with her heartaches are Blake, whose fierce attitude hides some affairs of her own, and Richard, a sassy gay editor prone to uttering “Ms.Thang” one moment and metrosexual platitudes the next. Jules ought to be fabulous and admirably courageous. After all, she lures her boss out of his office to hear her ideas by making his assistant laugh hysterically. Even better, she met Tony by helplessly chasing him through the streets—he is charmed by her adoration. Yet Jules doesn’t come off the page as charming, just materialistic. A fairy tale riddled with minor characters whose quirks are more intriguing than Jules’ quest for a conventional romance.
THE BLOOD OF GODS A Novel of Rome Iggulden, Conn Delacorte (400 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-385-34307-7
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look—and the rest of the players in Iggulden’s (Conqueror, 2011, etc.) spirited novel of ancient Rome are pretty tough, too. It’s the ides of March as the tale opens, and Julius Caesar has just concluded a very bad day. Brutus and Cassius, the self-styled “liberators” of the old Roman republic, have seen to that—and now, as Brutus warns Cassius, “Carry the small men with you and place every step with care, or we will be hunted down.” Indeed, and now it’s up to Caesar’s adopted son Octavian and his perhaps unlikely ally Mark Antony to exact vengeance. Novels about the Second Triumvirate aren’t common, in part, perhaps, since the events of history are plenty dramatic on their own; still, Iggulden does fine work in his deft character studies of the principals and their various motives for alternately stirring up civil war or defending a new empire in the borning: Octavian is proud and a little stiffnecked, blessed with “the power of the name he had been given”; Mark Antony is deliberate and thorough (“Tell me how you see it and I will consider what is best for Rome”); Brutus is tough, Cassius quick-witted, their ally, the senator Suetonius, plaintive: “I saved Rome from an insane tyrant who made a mockery of the Republic, who destroyed centuries of civilization by being too powerful to check or balance.” With such strong and willful people, you just know a clash is inevitable—and the best parts of this good novel are those of fierce battles such as Philippi, in scenes of “oil and splinters and floating bodies.”