November 11, 2013
McKinlay’s latest (after 2011’s The View From Here) finds a bestselling American novelist connecting with one of his British fans as he nears his 50th birthday and she anticipates her daughter’s wedding. Jackson Cooper, who fancies himself a man’s man, lashes out at the women around him after his wife leaves him for a woman. He’s suffering from writer’s block and the feeling that he hasn’t penned anything important. Jack has turned his creative impulses toward cooking, but the beautiful, well-meaning vegetarian he’s dating doesn’t appreciate any of it. He shares his love of food with Eve Petworth, whose mean late mother, Virginia, still casts a shadow over her life in the form of Eve’s brash daughter Izzy, whom Virginia raised. When an engaged-to-be-married Izzy contacts her estranged father Simon, it exacerbates Eve’s anxiety disorder. Both Eve and Jack are idle and rich, as evidenced by their free time and many mentions of their maids cleaning up in the background. They romanticize one another and claim that their meager letters and recipe exchanges serve as stress relief. Jack tries to get Eve to meet him in Paris every now and then, but unbeknownst to him, her condition prevents it. Readers will appreciate the way McKinlay captures emotional truths, but the puerility of her protagonists often hinders enjoyment.
September 15, 2013
When shy British woman Eve Petworth writes American author Jackson Cooper, they strike up a friendship that starts with culinary interests but goes deeper. A big shove for this debut, which gets a 250,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
December 15, 2013
British novelist McKinlay (The View from Here, 2011) offers a not-quite love affair through letters and emails between a wildly successful American writer and a lonely, well-to-do British woman. Long-divorced Eve Petworth has lived a reclusive if privileged life (driving a Bentley and never holding a job) in the English countryside. Shy and prone to anxiety attacks, she relinquished much of the control over her daughter Izzy's upbringing to her overpowering mother, Virginia. With the grown-up Izzy now engaged to marry and Virginia recently deceased, Eve potters about her beautiful house gardening and cooking; her only friend is her housekeeper. Eve seems an unlikely fan of popular American author Jackson Cooper's macho detective novels, but she appreciates the sensual way he writes about food and sends him a letter to say so. Approaching 50 and recently divorced for the second time, Jack is emotionally shaky and having trouble starting his next novel. Attracted to Eve's straightforwardness and love of food, he responds to her note, and a correspondence begins. The letters and emails, full of culinary conversation and ruminations on the human condition, offer Eve and Jack both a respite as each faces his or her own separate crisis. Jack, who has a Filipino houseboy for his house in the Hamptons and whose best friend is an actor named Dex, seems a British fantasy of American literary hunkiness--readers are repeatedly assured how well-written his best-sellers are. Nevertheless, Jack, who, while corresponding with Eve, has begun a doomed romance with beautiful ice princess Adrienne, is beset by midlife self-doubt. Meanwhile, Eve faces difficult truths about her relationship with Izzy, who has reconnected with her father, Simon, who turns out not to be an evil ex after all. Early on, before their epistolary intimacy deepens, Jack suggests he and Eve meet for a culinary rendezvous in Paris, a romantic fantasy that may or may not come to fruition. While mousy Eve and sensitive Marlborough Man Jack never quite grab the reader's imagination, McKinlay wisely eschews easy romantic cliches.
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