The Vintage Teacup Club by Vanessa Greene

The Vintage Teacup Club: A Novel.  Vanessa Greene. Penguin Group USA.  November 2013. 400 pp. pbk. ISBN #: 9780425265581.

Three women are standing together but apart as they stare at a set of vintage teacups.  One can feel the tension as each wants to buy the whole set but knows the others want that sale just as much. Before the reader realizes it, they come to a perfect compromise.  Each will share the set for a certain period of time before the last purchaser gets to own the whole set.  In the process a wonderful friendship is established and this novel is about the lives of these apparently unimportant women who live such typical and yet unique lives.  Their past is as much vintage living as the cups they share, with a history and consequences worth sharing!

Jennie’s engaged to Dan and seems very content with their love.  She enjoys sharing with her new found friends but is about to receive the shock of her life when she hears from someone unexpected.  And it’s not someone she wants in her life again at all!

Alison is a happily married woman with two daughters, one of who is feeling every one of her teenage oats and doesn’t mind letting her mother know it.  Alison worries that her previously close relationship is falling apart but something will occur that shows Alison hasn’t lost her daughter at all.  It’s a fairly common tale here but the way Alison and her friends deal with it all is what makes the friendship so valuable.

Maggie has tossed the past away along with a relationship which practically devastated her after she was rejected by the man she thought she would be living with forever.  However, she’s started a new florist business which has prospered and now includes a wedding she’s planning that’s probably the largest job she’s ever had. It’s got unique challenges since it’s to be geared to an Alice in Wonderland theme, complete with mushrooms and tea party to be held in a gorgeously planned garden.  The man in charge of the garden, however, Owen, is an ornery creature who seems to find a problem with Maggie’s every plan or suggestion and could definitely thwart her plans for the future as well since success with this endeavor would bode well for future business for sure.

The Vintage Teacup Club has a fairly simple plot but is no less endearing for that fact.  Sometimes there can be a loveliness to a simple story that is well-told with dynamic characters and unique plot. This is just such a story and very nicely done as Vanessa Greene’s first novel.