The Summer of No Attachments

In this gentle, feel-good romance, a small-town veterinarian and her dedicated assistant fall in love with two brothers.

As in The Somerset Girls, animal rescue is central to The Summer of No Attachments, Lori Foster's tender-hearted romance set again in Sunset, a small community in rural Kentucky. This installment focuses on Ivey Anders, a veterinarian who recently called it quits with her beau. Ivey is assisted at the vet clinic by Hope Mage, a good friend and dedicated worker who has sworn off men because of a disturbing incident that occurred several years before.

Ivey and Hope tend to an abandoned dog with a broken leg and soon discover the dog is pregnant. After the birth of the pups, Hope looks into renting a new apartment in town, roping in Ivey to offer her opinion of the place. There, Ivey meets the landlord, Corbin Meyer, a single businessman. Corbin has just learned he's father to a troubled 10-year-old boy, Justin. The child was dumped into Corbin's life by Justin's drug- and alcohol-addicted mother.

When the boy meets Ivey, the two instantly hit it off, discovering they share a love of animals and horror movies. Their connection bonds them--and Ivey and Corbin. As father and son get to know and fall in love with romantically reluctant Ivey, Hope meets Corbin's brother, Lang, who is smitten with Hope, but finds he must walk on eggshells in order to woo her wounded heart.

Foster's feel-good, small-town romance weaves in well-plotted story threads and complications that expose how scars from the past, if healed, can unlock more hopeful, brighter futures. 

 

The Summer of No Attachments by Lori Foster

HQN: Harlequin, $16.99 paperback, 9781335459893, 336 pages

Publication Date: June 22, 2021

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (June 22, 2021), link HERE 

First Pages in Fiction: Instructions for a Heatwave

The first paragraph of a short story and/or the first page of a novel can be a microcosm that sets the foundation for what's to follow in terms of tone, character and story intent.

Here are the first few paragraphs from the novel, Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell:

Highbury, London 

The heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome: it lies along corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into the floor, against the side of the table.

Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.

Consider her now, yanking open the oven and grimacing in its scorching blasts as she pulls out the bread tin. She is in her nightdress, hair still wound into curlers. She takes two steps backwards and tips the steaming loaf into the sink, the weight of it reminding her, as it always does, of a baby, a newborn, the packed, damp warmth of it.

She has made soda bread three times a week for her entire married life. She is not about to let a little thing like a heatwave get in the way of that. Of course, living in London, it is impossible to get buttermilk; she has to make do with a mixture of half milk and half yogurt. A woman at Mass told her it worked and it does, up to a point, but it is never quite the same.


This is a story about a family thrown into crisis when the patriarch, Robert Riordan, a retired bank employee--husband of Gretta and father to three adult children--disappears on a hot summer morning in 1976. Gretta reaches out to her children in an effort to find Robert, but as the story unravels, it soon becomes clear that her children are more lost than her husband (on a psychological and emotional level), as each child is facing challenges in his/her personal life and in relationship to each other. The nature of secrets, estrangement and shame rise to the forefront of the narrative. 

O'Farrell sets up those first four paragraphs to reflect an ominous restlessness amid actions of normal, daily life. This would appear a day like many others ("She has made soda bread three times a week for her entire married life"), but something about this particular day is and will be different. For starters, Gretta is baking, operating the oven, amid a heatwave and the reference to the need to substitute buttermilk in the recipe ("A woman at Mass told her it worked and it does, up to a point, but it is never quite the same") might be a metaphor indicative that perhaps, amid the crucible of events that unfold over the course of the novel, the ingredients that make up this Irish-Catholic family might never be the same, either.  

The kitchen often symbolizes the center of family life and if you look at the language O'Farrell employs, the tactile sense of the bread reminds Gretta of a baby ("...a newborn, the packed damp warmth of it"), which seems reflective of the implications of Gretta's children in this story.

In a few short sentences, O'Farrell evokes a sense of the oppressive, stifling heat that mirrors the brooding, pressured confinement of the story and how, as stated later in the book, "Strange weather brings out strange behavior." It's also interesting to note that O'Farrell relies on an Irish comfort food to anchor and ultimately juxtapose the coziness of family life against the idea that the "heat" in these lives is about to get turned up.

See how much you can learn about a book from the first page?


Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95 Hardcover, 9780385349406 304 pages
Publication Date: June 18, 2013
To order this book via INDIEBOUND, link HERE

Summer Family Sagas

The summer months may turn up the heat, but nowhere as profoundly as within extended families that come together to share vacation time. No matter the idyllic setting or good intentions, when loved ones gather, fireworks often ensue--making for some great drama on the page.

In The Red House by Mark Haddon, estranged British siblings Richard and Angela reunite at their mother's funeral. Afterward, Richard, a wealthy physician with a new wife and a wretched teenage daughter, invites Angela, her feckless husband and their three teenage children to his big country home in Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh border. As the polyphonic narrative unfolds, the reader comes to realize that these eight people--with vastly different personalities, operating systems and agendas--have brought a lot more baggage with them than meets the eye.

Fourth of July weekend in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts is the backdrop for The World Without You by Joshua Henkin. Shared grief and mourning unite the Frankels--a large, mostly nonobservant Jewish-American family--as they gather for a weekend at their parents' vacation home to unveil the gravestone for their brother Leo, a journalist and adventurer killed in Iraq a year earlier. But once everyone is settled beneath the same roof, the memorial becomes shrouded by sibling rivalries and marital feuds in this story of love, loss and the true meaning of family in the aftermath of tragedy.

Catholic guilt, alcoholism and bad choices are the undercurrents that propel J. Courtney Sullivan's Maine. The story is told via the distinct viewpoints of three generations of women from the Irish-American Kelleher clan who assemble, with their respective families and significant others, for their annual summer retreat at a cottage set on three acres of Maine beachfront property. Over the course of a month, family secrets are gradually unveiled that probe the relationships between the women, blurring the line between love and anger. 

Note: This article is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this piece as published on Shelf Awareness for Readers (8/3/12), link HERE