Tuesday Review: The Cottage on Juniper Ridge

The Cottage on Juniper Ridge

By Sheila Roberts

Publisher: Harlequin Mira

Release Date:

February 25, 2014

Jen Heath has lost all joy in her life. She is working two jobs in order to pay her mortgage, her car payment, and her maxed out credit cards. Looking back, she realizes she was crazy to buy the Seattle condo she fell in love with but couldn’t really afford and crazier to hit the limit on her credit cards for all the furniture and accessories she just had to have for her new home. Now she has no time to enjoy her home or her friends, and even finding time for her family is a stretch. A year after her divorce, she still can’t find time to date. Jen used to love Christmas, but now the holiday just means more tasks added to her must-do list. After a particularly difficult day, Jen goes home, calls in sick, and curls up with a book that her sister gave her—Simplicity by Muriel Sterling. As a result of reading the book, in an impulsive move to simplify her life, Jen quits her job, puts her condo up for sale, and moves to the small town of Icicle Falls, Washington, where she discovers the joys of life with fewer stresses, including a part-time job at a bookstore, and new friends who are kindred spirits, and begins writing a book. Learning to drive on snowy roads presents a challenge, but if only her landlord, sexy firefighter Garrett Armstrong, would stop jumping to conclusions about her similarity to his irresponsible ex-wife, life would be practically perfect.

Jen is only one of the women whose lives are transformed by reading Simplicity. Stacy Thomas’s motto when it comes to collectibles or sale items is the more, the merrier. When she decorates her home for Christmas, it is so cluttered that her guests can’t find a place to set a cup of coffee, and her husband complains that she has taken over their shared closets. Single mother, Chita Arness is stretched so thin with her job, her kids, and her volunteer activities that she has no time for herself. Even Jen’s sister Toni worries that her husband’s work which, thanks to the computer, infringes on personal time, her daughter’s constant texting, and her son’s video games are destroying the loving connection that once characterized her marriage and family.  Each of these women will discover ways to simplify her life, ways that will allow her to have a life that is richer and more satisfying than the one she has known.

 Although there are several romantic elements in The Cottage on Juniper Ridge, the primary one being Jen and Garrett’s relationship, the novel is more women’s fiction than romance. The focus is on the women and their friendships and individual journeys, and the romances are just one part of the women’s lives. As readers familiar with Sheila Roberts’s books will expect, there is a rich vein of humor, some of it quite broad and some of it wonderfully subtle. I found myself smiling a lot during the sisterly exchanges between Jen and Toni.  But there is also wisdom that most of us would do well to heed in the idea of simplifying complicated, overextended lives.

I’ve enjoyed all of the Icicle Falls books, but this one is my favorite. I liked Jen, and even though I could have shaken Garrett a few times, I liked him too. His stubborn clinging to clearly wrong-headed conclusions and his basic decency reminded me of men I know. I also liked that Roberts showcased women at various stages of their lives—from the single Jen to the older, twice-widowed author of Simplicity. This is the fourth book in the series, and while it can be read as a standalone, it is a more satisfying reading experience for those who have read the other books and are familiar with Icicle Falls.

I know people who are skeptical about the power of a book to change lives, but I’m a believer because I can point to several that changed mine. Can you point to particular books that changed your life in specific ways?

Bonus Review: While We Were Watching Downton Abbey

While We Were Watching Downton Abbey

By Wendy Wax

Publisher: Berkeley Trade

Release Date: April 2, 2013

Edward Parker, a British transplant proud of the family tradition of service, is the owner of Private Butler, a personal concierge company that six months earlier was selected to supply concierge service for the historic Alexander, “a beautifully renovated Beaux Arts and Renaissance Revival-styled apartment building in the center of Midtown Atlanta.” Edward, dapper and discrete, is the perfect concierge. To create a greater sense of community among those who live in the Alexander, Edward comes up with the idea of weekly viewings of the first two seasons of Downton Abbey on the big screen television in the clubroom, complete with popcorn and wine and “English-themed nibbles” to follow the screening.

Neither Brooke Mackenzie, Samantha Davis, nor Claire Walker is enthusiastic about watching a stuffy British TV show with a bunch of strangers, but each finds herself attending the viewing. As they watch Downton Abbey and become engaged with the show’s characters, they become friends. Their lives intersect with one another’s and with Edward’s in surprising ways.

Brooke is a divorcee with two young daughters, ages seven and five, and an ex-husband who discarded her for an Atlanta socialite who was a better advertisement for his skills as a plastic surgeon and more in tune with his ambitions. Brooke is lonely and dissatisfied with herself and her life. Years of placating her husband have turned her into a doormat, and she’s not sure how to change. Her friendship with Samantha and Claire brings people into her life who care about her, and Edward’s recognition of skills that Brooke has developed as a homemaker and mother paves the way for a career and possibilities she never dared dream.

Samantha married into Atlanta royalty and for twenty-five years she has been trying to deserve the man who saved her and her two younger siblings when their father’s greed and dishonesty destroyed the life they had known. She didn’t love Jonathan Davis when she married him, but she has fallen in love with him over the years. However, she’s so caught up in maintaining the perfect image and feeling grateful that she cannot allow herself to be honest and express her real feelings. When her perfect life falls to pieces, it is her new friends who help her discover a strength and determination she never knew she possessed.

Claire is facing a new life. Divorced for sixteen years after a brief marriage that she knew was a mistake from the beginning, she has worked, cared for aging parents, and nurtured her daughter in suburban Atlanta. Now she has a new apartment and a new life. Her daughter is a freshman at Northwestern University, and Claire, who has written two moderately successful historical romance novels, has enough money to spend a year working fulltime on her breakout novel. The only problem is she is suffering from an advanced case of writer’s block—until she discovers the seeds of a different story in the lives of her new friends.

While We Were Watching Downton Abbey is the story of the unlikely friendship that develops among these characters. The three women are at different stages in their lives, they are from different backgrounds, and they appear to have little in common other than their address. But over three months, they come to trust one another and to open themselves to the joys and the challenges of friendship. While there are some romantic elements in the story, the focus is on the power of friendship to comfort and empower.

Downton Abbey fans will doubtless enjoy the references to characters from the series, and they may see some parallels between Yorkshire estate and village of Downton Abbey and the Alexander where characters from the wealthy elite such as the Samantha and Jonathan Davis are brought into contact with their social inferiors. They may also make connections between Edward and Carson, Samantha and Lady Mary, and perhaps Violet and Samantha’s mother-in-law, but it is not necessary to be familiar with the show to appreciate the novel.

Wax excels at using humor, bits of local color, and multiple, complex female protagonists, and she uses all of these to good effect here. I found Brooke, Samantha, and Claire interesting and likeable, and Edward, a George Clooney lookalike with a British accent and a big heart, is the stuff of dreams. He made me want to move to the Alexander immediately.  I also enjoyed the references to familiar Atlanta spots.

I also loved, as I typically do with Wax’s novels, the memorable lines that say a great deal in a sentence or two. These are among my favorites:

Of the effects of Brooke’s marriage to the jerk:

By then her imperfections were the only thing in their marriage that she still recognized.

Of Claire’s feeling caught between who she once was and who she is becoming:

She felt like a disembodied spirit with one foot in the old life and one in the new but belonging in neither.

Of Samantha’s saying yes to her savior prince:

There was plenty of precedent for prince-marrying in the fairy-tale world. Sleeping Beauty had not ignored the prince’s kiss in favor of a few more years of shut-eye. Cinderella never considered refusing to try on the glass slipper. And Snow White didn’t bat an eyelash at moving in with those seven little men

If you like women’s fiction that makes you smile, warms your heart, and reminds you why friendship matters, this book is definitely one you will enjoy.

Girlfriends

I will be celebrating my BFF’s birthday Saturday. We go back a long way, more than half a century, to a time when two four-year-olds, one with dimples and dark curls and one with stick-straight blonde hair and a too-wide mouth, shared a consuming desire to play tambourine in the kindergarten rhythm band. “Cool” wasn’t in our vocabularies yet, but we knew the six five-year-old girls who played the tambourines were the ones who got the attention and the praise. They were who we wanted to be. We learned a lot of things that year—how to tell right from left, how to print our names, and how to please the teacher. The latter skill helped us move from lowly rhythm-stick players to the coveted tambourine positions the next year. But the most important thing we learned was that best friends were for sharing books, telling stories, giggling over boys, and keeping secrets.

All these years later, after decades of sharing triumphs and trip-ups, births, and deaths, a lifetime of laughter and more tears that we could have dreamed of at four, we still understand the role of best friend. We are very different women who have led very different lives. We disagree about religion, politics, hairstyles, music, and who Lynn H. really liked best in second grade. But we never run out of things to talk about, we can finish each other’s sentences, and we know with absolute certainty that the place we hold in one another’s heart, like the place we hold in one another’s history, is large and sure.

The summer of 2010, I went to a reunion. Not a class reunion--this one was much smaller. It was a reunion of a small group with whom I shared a big part of my life from elementary school through high school. Most of us attended the same church and our parents were friends. We grew up feeling at home in one another’s houses, being disciplined and comforted by one another’s parents, sharing tea parties and softball, football games and barefoot dancing at the swimming pool, hugs and heartbreaks. After high school, we kept in touch, although more and more sporadically as our lives moved in different directions.

But occasional lunches when everyone was in town, Christmas letters, and church homecomings kept us part of one another’s lives. That summer gathering was golden, hours and hours of talking and laughing and looking at photographs of the girls we were and the women we had become. Husbands and SOs joined in. There were no awkward silences or uncomfortable moments, just old friends enjoying one another. Of the five married couples in the group, three got together during those halcyon days and still have the kind of relationship that had them exchanging glances across the room and dancing in the moonlight. How wonderful to be reminded that HEAs do happen in real life too. Another, who was widowed, had just returned from her honeymoon, a motorcycle trip to Las Vegas. I’m going to use her in a book one day.

College, grad school, teaching years—at every stage of my life there have been women friends who added color and meaning to my life. Some of my closest friends now are women whom I’ve never met face-to-face, but with whom I exchange emails, share dreams, and rant and rave about the disasters and delights of our reading, our writing, and our lives.

Friends not only make us happier; they also make us healthier. Studies have shown that, for women, talk and touch release the hormone oxytocin (the same hormone that initiates labor in pregnant women).  Oxytocin reduces stresss, calming both mind and body. Hugs and chats really are good for you. Spending time with our girlfriends also fosters the release of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being. A Dove study suggested that women friends also increase our self-esteem. Among the women in the study, 75 percent felt prettier because of other women. Yet another study reported that the more friends a woman has, the less likely she is to develop physical impairments as she ages. Some experts suggest that women who lack these close friendships are placing themselves at a risk for health problems equal to that of smoking.

In real life and in online communication, I spend a lot of time laughing with my friends. For me, shared laughter is an essential part of intimacy. I can’t imagine a close relationship that didn’t include laughter. Did you know that the benefits of laughter are similar to the benefits of exercise? One study found that over the course of a year, laughter increased levels of good HDL cholesterol by 26 percent and decreased C-reactive proteins, a measure of inflammation linked to both heart disease and diabetes risk by 66 percent. And while some people claim that the internet is a threat to friendship, research indicates that, especially for women, online friendships after a year become comparable in quality to real-life friendships. Self-disclosure rather than face time seems to be the key to quality friendships.

So if you’re feeling good, have a healthy self-esteem, and are looking forward to more happy years, take time to say thanks to your girlfriends. You owe some of that health and happiness to them.

This Saturday, I’ll be singing “Happy Birthday, dear Nancy” to my BFF. Today I’m saying thank you to her and to Beth, Anne, Peggy, Sheron, Martha, and dear Micki (who left us last year); to Mary, Sandy, Linda, Trisha, Judy, Marty, Kay, Claudia, Rachels, Shannon, Mary Anne, Sylvia, and Wilma (RIP); to Elizabeth, Beth F., Effie, and Marge; to Linda, Bette, Joanne, Pat, Lane, and Janet; to Dana, Brenda, the Pats, Patsy, and Bonita; to the Bon Bons, the Vanettes, and my Safe Zone sisters; and to others too numerous to name. I am indeed blessed to call you all friend.

Friends, I will remember you,

think of you, pray for you,

and when another day is through,

I'll still be friends with you.

--John Denver

How important do you consider friends in your life? What do you think are the most essential qualities of friendship?