New Uses for Old Boyfriends: A Novel. Beth Kendrick. Penguin Publishing Group (USA).
February 2015. 336 pp. ISBN#: 9780451465863.
Lila
and her mother Daphne know everything worth knowing about fashion design and
style. It’s a world filled with beauty
and glamour but a world fraught with uncertainty. Lila painfully discovers how
fleeting wealth and success can be. A TV
star of a home shopping cable affiliate in Philadelphia and married to a
successful man, Lila hears her husband announce he is leaving her for another
woman and she also loses her job.
Boom! What else can she do but
return home to Black Dog Bay and begin anew!
At
first Lila is humiliated as she must confess her demise to all of her past
friends, including some guys she dated years earlier. Then her life is overcome by the discovery
that her father death left her mother penniless and that Daphne has charged her
way into immense debt. There are some
many funny moments in the exchanges between mother and daughter as Daphne
fluctuates between despair about the loss of her fashionable collections, which
she never wears by the way, and her new joie de vivant attitude. Eat those deliciously fattening chocolates
and toss back that mood-lifting zesty wine!
Lila,
however, comes up with a brilliant plan that grows into a larger vision. Should she sell Daphne’s home and all of her
charged goodies on EBay? Necessity rules
this decision. The remainder of the
story is delightful as Lila and Daphne begin to plan and discover that there’s
a huge demand for selling vintage clothing and jewelry. Thus the rest of the novel awaits the
pleasure of readers as the road to running a successful boutique, with the
assistance of certain males, continues.
In
the process, Lila begins to realize that the men who are pursuing her have
different motives. All in all, the
disasters that have molded Lila into the strong woman she is today enable her
to perceive what is romantically possible, what should be deemed as friendship
and nothing more, and what is truly a romantic connection that is also
friendship and delight in sharing “all” of her in mind and spirit as well as
body.
New Uses… is a delightfully clever read that is
pure entertainment, with a few eye-openers to add to its punch! Nicely crafted, Beth Kendrick!
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