The Second Sister. Marie Bostwick. Kensington
Press. March 2015. 353 pp. pb. ISBN # 9780758269300.
Lucy Toomey has been living
the fast-paced, whirling life of a Washington insider as the campaign assistant
of a Presidential candidate. Working
umpteen hours a day, her diet and her clothing style have suffered
dramatically. She has no life outside of
this job. The only reminder that she once had such a life is in the middle of
the night telephone calls from her sister, Alice. Alice keeps Lucy up to date on the
occurrences in her home town of Nilson’s Bay in Wisconsin but every topic is
interrupted with Alice’s plea that Lucy return home for Christmas. Lucy has few good memories of her time in
that town but promises finally to come home for Christmas to her mentally
challenged sister. That promise happens
but not in the way Lucy expects. For a day before the election, Lucy receives a
call that her sister has been found dead from an overdose of drugs.
It’s Lucy’s boss, soon to be
President-elect, who insists that Lucy return to Wisconsin for the funeral and
for at least a month after that. Lucy
had insisted the same for him after a family loss and now he demands she do the
same, not only to mourn but to think about what is really important in life
before she returns to work for him after he is sworn in as President of the
United States. Return Lucy does and at
first has trouble dealing with her mourning and all the friends of Alice who
treat her like the person who abandoned her sister.
The day of the funeral Lucy
discovers her sister had earlier planned and written a very carefully plotted
will that means Lucy must remain in Wisconsin for a time or lose the
inheritance of the cottage where Alice lived, a place left to her by their
parents. This then is the story of how
Lucy begins to remember the better times in her past and focuses on the things
that truly give lasting pleasure and meaning to life.
It’s a lovely engaging story
that never lags with fascinating people and places in this small Wisconsin
town. Romance may lie ahead for persons
and other activities that Lucy never believed she could come to hold dear, but
she gets the chance to see things a different way. That makes all the difference in the world,
in Lucy’s world, a world she comes to share and see as Alice did!
Very nicely crafted, Ms.
Bostwick!
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