This feel-good, actually too-good-to-be-true novel is about middle-age female friendships.

In the story, when the motivational speaker Cecilia (Cece) Ross’s best friend and neighbor Penny dies, she finds herself at odds with life and unsatisfied with the present condition. So Cece decides to make a big change in her life. Selling her lavish Minnesota home, she moves in as a renter/housemate into an old house in Saint Paul. In the meantime, she receives a postcard from her old love Dennis Halsinger.

In her new abode Cece connects with the three other women: Lise, Joni, and Reni. All women have unresolved problems, mistakes, and shortsightedness issues from their past. The four women, with Cece’s goading, jump on a Suburban and go on a small journey, while they try to rectify their past mistakes. The bonding of the women takes its time, and the journey part of the novel is much shorter than the events leading to it.

The plot. written from CeCe's viewpoint, has the main character Cece connect to new people and situations, to find new solutions to her unrealized dreams. As a character, I found Cece to be a bit too wise, too stable to act on a whim such as selling a house and possessions that she accumulated with much love through the decades. Also, with her characteristics such as wisdom and insight and understanding, how she lost focus of her own life in the backstory with the love of her life, takes away from her credibility as a strong character. With the other female characters, their roles seemed to be assigned to them as if on stage.

Everything about this novel is nice and neat, a little too neat, with the story ending satisfactorily for each character.

What rescues the novel from being all sugar and spice is the author’s writing style and perceptive insights on the hearts of the women. For that reason, if I say I didn’t enjoy the novel, it would not be true. Still, despite the fact that I made it to the end of the story, I felt as if something genuine was missing.

the ease of the writing style.

the actions being too sweet, too chancy, and too easy. The story seems to be written according to a template or a formula, and didn't feel all that real to me.

is Elizabeth Berg, a woman's fiction writer. She has written many novels, the most noted are Open House and Talk Before You Sleep.

it is easy reading about women and the writing is fluent, but I couldn't find anything literary about it.

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Created Nov 26, 2014 at 2:47pm • Submit your own review...