Customer Reviews

Stone Creek

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a great summer read. With compassionate, loving and warm characters, Ms. Lustbader's soothing voice is a gentle guiding hand as the novel journeys through two strangers grieving loss. Lustbader examines the many facets of love and human relationships from male/female and adult to child points of view.

Set in smalltown upstate New York, Lily spends a summer at Stone Creek while her powerful, workaholic husband, Paul, is home in New York City. Their once passionate marriage, has fizzled somewhat under the weight of Lily's childless sadness. While Lily is a vulnerable character, you get the sense of a quiet, penetrating power within her. One that Danny (ten years younger) rugged, sexy, outdoorsy thirty-something widower is drawn to and they form a very realistic and compassionate bond. Danny's son Caleb is swept up by Lily, too. It's well done and there are some nice moments between even the minor characters. Get tissues ready.

'... which is worse - to lose something vital that you have had, or to have never had it at all...'

Stone Creek is about love, passion, forgiving, emptiness in the heart, sex and parenthood. Mrs Lustbader had to have lived `Stone Creek' to write about it so honestly. This is a great book, one that didn't leave me indifferent to the solitude felt by a woman that has it all.

I read this book and was excited to read it from the great reviews I read on Amazon. This book is easy to read, but I did not find the depth in the characters that I thought needed to surface. I felt compassion for Eve the Mother in Law and less for Lilly who to me was portrayed as poor me. I have everything but I am not happy. This is another story of someone marring someone saying they don't want children and then angry when the other partner doesn't understand when they change their mind. I loved little Caleb, but the ending was rushed and I really I had no idea what happened. It is an easy read but probably 50 pages too long.

I really enjoyed Victoria Lustbader's style of writing. The author uses an unusual approach by offering the view point of almost every character in the novel when describing a scene.

The plot is very similar to the novel "Mystic Lake," which was written prior to this book.

Although I enjoyed the book, the ending was somewhat abrupt and seemed a bit unfinished. Perhaps Lustbader left it open for a sequel, which I would be eager to read. i will probably read the author's first novel--Hidden--even thought the stories are totally different, I enjoyed the writing style. Definitely a more sophisticated read than most typical romance novels. I recommend this one.

Victoria Lustbader expertly looks at grief, love, loneliness, identity issues and passionate sex, and how these might intertwine, in STONE CREEK, an escapist page-turner that will be in more than a few beach bags this summer.

Lustbader comes to her second novel with experience. As a former fiction editor and the wife of novelist Eric Van Lustbader, she intimately knows the mechanics of writing a novel. This book reads smoothly from cover to cover. The story is set in the well-rendered fictional small town of Stone Creek, 70 miles northwest of New York City, a place she does a solid job sketching out for the reader.

But it's the characters, not the place, that are the heart and soul of this novel. Danny Malloy is the attractive young widower and construction worker who married out of his class and whose grieving mother-in-law, Eve Jamison, won't let him forget it. As the story opens, it's been almost a year since his wife Tara died, and Danny finds it is all he can do to take care of his five-year-old son Caleb and make it through another day. Lustbader employs the oft-used device of a journal left behind by the deceased wife Tara as a method of filling in some historical blanks for the readers about Danny and Tara, and their passionate love for each other. It's a bit of a clichéd device, but it works.

Danny's life is about to intersect with Lily Spencer, a beautiful 46-year-old woman with everything money can buy. But she's suffering from boredom and feels distant from her husband Paul, a 54-year-old workaholic corporate lawyer. They've been married nine years and are childless, a condition that is unpacked more thoroughly as the novel unfolds. Paul is a likable man prone to thoughtful gestures who has overcome his past as an unloved adopted son and strives to achieve. Lustbader makes him more than the easy cookie-cutter character, however, and it's hard for readers to dislike or dismiss him. I particularly liked this description of Paul: "He sets his sights on something or someone and most of the time he gets what he's after. And if he doesn't get what he's after, he stops wanting it. It's a trick he taught himself...."

Eve, the mother-in-law you'd love to hate, is in fact impossible to hate because of the multifaceted way Lustbader portrays her character. Eve is anxious, angry, grieving, and feels a tremendous sense of guilt over an action in her past that later will shed light on her hatred of Danny. Her influence on Caleb threatens the peace that Danny and his son carved out after Caleb's mother's death.

Although it takes a bit of getting used to, the present tense narration lends a sense of urgency to the story. Each character's motivations are gradually unveiled by Lustbader, as the tale moves to its unexpected conclusion. The complicated relationships between different people keep the tension high as the novel progresses.

For Lily, her life, however wonderful it looks on the outside, is just not enough. She needs to find herself, and her relationship with Danny holds the key to unlocking Lily's own identity and helping her get a grip on her marriage. Lest readers be angry with Danny, Lustbader is clear that his relationship with Lily is just what he needs to heal from his grief. Lest readers be angry at Lily for cheating on Paul, Lustbader gives Paul flaws. I found what happens with Paul to be a plot device employed to make him less of a sympathetic character.

The themes of grief resolution, midlife angst and identity should generate plenty of discussion about STONE CREEK and will likely keep a few book groups chatting about it late into the night.

--- Reviewed by Cindy Crosby.

Stone Creek was one of the most moving, thoughtful books about love and loss that I have read in a long time. The familiar themes are there: love, marriage, parenthood, grief, generational relations, infidelity and the consequences of our life choices. Yet, these themes are not treated in the usual, familiar way with the neat predictable outcomes you often find in fiction of this genre. Instead, Lustbader pushes the boundaries of black-and-white thinking about right and wrong in the context of everyday relationships and lives. At its core is the notion that all people are flawed, but most are flawed in extremely complicated ways that are often juxtaposed with some of their most redeeming qualities.

These concepts are explored through the lives of Lily and her husband Paul, who are finding serious chinks in the armour of their previously passionate and near-perfect marriage, Danny and his son Caleb grieving the loss of Danny's wife and Caleb's mother Tara, and Tara's mother Eve, who views her daughter's death through the eyes of her own demons. Their lives all become tied in ways that both condemn and redeem them.

The book is really a character study of regular people with normal lives, normal problems and normal desires. This is the kind of book that makes you feel not quite so alone in the world. Life can be messy, complicated, confusing and yet still contain moments of pure magic and hope. Lustbader is a very lyrical writer with a gift for portraying intense sexual and emotional tension without falling into the trap of cliches.

This book is a great summer/beach read.

Although she still believes that Paul is the one for her, Lily starts to doubt whether she still loves her husband. Lately she has found nothing brings her joy especially her lack of connection on any level with workaholic Paul.

Needing time to find her equilibrium and decide what to do about her marriage, Lily leaves Paul and Manhattan to spend the summer at Stone Creek in Upstate New York while her spouse takes no time off from work. There she meets widower Danny and his sad five year old son Caleb. Although a decade older than Danny, they are attracted to one another, but it is Caleb who enters Lily's heart. Meanwhile Paul has an epiphany that Lily is unhappy, but he is assigned a critical case so he must choose.

In many ways the support cast Paul as a workaholic and Caleb as a grieving little boy steal the show from the lead pair Lily and Danny. However, overall they enhance an insightful character study that looks deep into child grief, spousal estrangement, and maternal biological clocks. Ultimately simple yet convoluted relationships as Lily's need for contentment changes four lives. Although some of the issues are repetitively overdone, fans of contemporary tales will appreciate Lily's search for happiness in STONE CREEK.

Harriet Klausner

I got as far as page 33 before giving up. After reading "Danny fills one of his son's plastic Pooh plates with ten bite-sized cubes of organic Cheddar cheese, five red grapes cut in half because Caleb likes to lick their watery surfaces before popping them in his mouth, and ten whole almonds." Forth-one words to say he got his son lunch. I'm giving this book the lowest rating because I depend on ratings to buy books. I was misled by this one.

Easy read. Couldn't put down, but not because it was that good. Just wanted to finish it to see how it ends. In some places it was way too wordy with outlandish descriptions of emotions, thoughts and feelings. Couldn't get into Lily. Felt sad for her that she had a control freak husband, but otherwise thought she was a "poor little rich lady" who didn't know what she wanted. Couldn't stand Paul, but loved Danny and Caleb. Eve was a little bit weird. Her coming to Danny and pouring out her secrets that led to their sudden friendship was a little farfetched. Still a quick and easy read for relaxation, but not much depth.

The book arrived promptly and in the condition it was listed as. This book was an awesome read!!