By Mary Kay Andrews
Read: January 2011
Rating: Enjoyable
Chick lit that isn’t all about the romance! It’s a nice change of pace.
Keeley Murdock is an interior designer in the small down of Madison, Georgia. It’s the rehearsal dinner for her marriage to a rich, influential young man from a good family. Then she finds him shtupping her best friend on a board room table and it’s all over.
She pitches a helluva ‘hissy fit’. Personally, I define hissy fits are being over something stupid, which this is not. Either way, she trashed the country club’s hall in front of everyone. When she stalks outside she takes out a key and scratches “ASSHOLE” on her ex-fiance’s car.
There’s some guy laughing at her. Why? She forgot an S. ASHOLE.
Turns out he’s not a bad sort, though. He offers her a ride home. Soon it comes out that this Will Mahoney character is a wealthy lingerie tycoon-in-the-making who’s bought the old bra factory. And he’s just bought a run-down old mansion which needs decorating. But Keeley, you have to understand. This house has to make another woman fall in love with him. He’s never met her, but he saw her on TV and he’s in looourve with her.
Keeley’s damn good at her job so she does it, working to perfect a house for this mystery woman. She wishes she’d stay a mystery. This Stephanie Scofield is a superficial nitwit with no taste, but Will is head over heels for her.
Now, most books in this genre would turn this into a novel about the push/pull between Keeley and Stephanie for Will’s attention. Thank GAWD we can avoid all that! Keeley denies any attraction when anyone suggests it, but we know there is something quiet simmering. She never makes a big thing out of it, and he does very little that’s overt. Just tiny things.
She has other things on her mind. Like completing his impossible project in about six months. (Huge mansion. Addition built. May to Thanksgiving. ACK!) And there’s the matter of humiliating her ex’s influential family… which is now trying to drive her out of business. Everyone in town is looking at her like she’ll go psycho on them at any moment. And she’s still bothered by her mother’s strange disappearance twenty-five years ago.
The book is about Keeley juggling all of this, which she does with great aplomb. Despite the book launching with a hissy fit, she’s actually a very controlled person. Which is probably why she went off in such a dramatic way. She does have a dramatic moment later in the book, which is, again, prompted by something incredibly serious. I would say her ‘hissy fits’ only happen for damn good reason.
It’s a really good story about a woman continuing her life post-failed-wedding, just trying for normal and sane. She wants to HAVE a life. It’s about letting go and opening up.
And at the very end, there’s just enough hint at romance to leave you happy.
