Prospect Street

July 1, 2002

Richards (Fox River) adds to the territory staked out by such authors as Barbara Delinsky and Kristin Hannah with her hardcover debut, an engrossing novel about rebuilding relationships after a betrayal. Faith Bronson, daughter of an overbearing U. S. senator and wife of a conservative family-values lobbyist, gets a shock when she stumbles upon her beloved husband with his male lover. After the development becomes public, the repercussions sweep away her sheltered life and profoundly affect her children, nine-year-old Alex and 14-year-old Remy, as well as her parents' marriage. Faith's new life begins when her mother gives her their old family home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., which is badly in need of repair. The house guards long-buried secrets: some sweet, some tragic and some pertaining to the unsolved kidnapping of Faith's older sister as an infant. While Faith attempts to come to terms with her family's past, she must rein in rebellious Remy, who's resentful of having to move to a new house and a new school, and deal with her attraction to Internet entrepreneur Pavel Quinn, a man with secrets of his own. Over the course of a year, Faith renovates the house and, in the process, lays down the foundation for her future. Richards's writing is unpretentious and effective ("She'd never had to think about what to say to her daughter. Now every word needed a rehearsal"), and her characters burst with vitality and authenticity despite a dose of sentimentality near the end.

July 1, 2002
It was a mystery to Faith Bronson why her 15-year marriage had gone from passionate to platonic, but when she discovers her husband in the arms of another man, the solution turns her world upside down. Now an even greater mystery awaits her as she and her two adolescent children begin anew in a ramshackle Georgetown row house that has been in her mother's family for generations. Nearly 40 years ago, her parents' first child, Hope, had been kidnapped from the upstairs nursery, and the mystery of her disappearance has haunted and divided the family ever since. As Faith works to unearth family secrets and renovate her ancestral home, she encounters Pavel Quinn, a sexy neighbor whose attention she welcomes until her investigation uncovers the truth about Pavel's own shadowy past. The story of a newly-single woman struggling to reinvent herself in the wake of a divorce is hardly a new one, but Richards does the predictable plot proud through this compelling story of a family's destruction and resurrection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)