Everything to Gain

July 4, 1994
Bradford weighs in with a maudlin saga about a woman's struggle to go on after a devastating tragedy. Her narrator, New York wife and mother Mallory Keswick, feels she is showered with blessings, but just as the family is making plans to go to London for Christmas, her husband, twin children and dog are murdered in an attempted carjacking. Depressed and contemplating suicide, Mal flees to London, where she slowly learns to accept her losses. Returning to the States, she turns the family's Connecticut weekend retreat into a successful business venture and eventually meets a man who is able to breach her emotional barricades. Spanning five years and two continents, Bradford's chronicle offers several affecting passages--but when Mal continues to mention the loss of her dog in the same tragic litany as her husband and children, credibility evaporates. Monotonous inventory listings of the trappings of material success slow the narrative momentum, as does the author's flat prose and tin-ear dialogue, especially ludicrous since Mal is supposedly a Radcliffe graduate. Nor does Bradford reach beyond her tried and true romantic formula for greater complexity--or even to tie up some potentially intriguing plot lines that mysteriously evaporate after they are introduced. Major ad/promo ; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selection ; audio rights to HarperAudio ; author tour.

April 15, 1994
In Bradford's first book with her new publisher, heroine Mallory Keswick must learn to live again after a terrible tragedy, traveling first to her country home and then to the Yorkshire moors for refuge and, eventually, revelation.

July 1, 1994
A cryptic prologue sets the scene for tragedy in Bradford's latest, about a blissfully married mother of twins. Mallory is the wife of successful Madison Avenue ad exec Andrew Keswick, an Englishman with a charming ancestral home and a talented mother who runs a London antique gallery. Bradford really overdoes the perfection of this young woman's life in order to set the character (and readers) up for a devastating lossthe senseless murder of her entire family, including her beloved bichon frise, Trixy. Mallory's recovery from her grief is as overdone as her previous bliss. After months of depression, she sets up a successful business; eventually, she falls in love again. Bradford's fans won't be disappointed. ((Reviewed July 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)