From Amazon:
"As a professional home stager, Sandy Sullivan is an expert at transforming cluttered rooms into attractive houses ready for sale. If only reinventing her life were as easy as choosing the perfect paint color. She’s eager to put her family’s suburban Boston home on the market, to downsize, and to simplify her own life. But she must first deal with her foot-dragging husband and her grown son, who has moved back home after college to inhabit the basement “bat cave.”
After reading them the riot act, Sandy takes a job staging a boutique hotel in Atlanta recently acquired by her best friend’s boyfriend. The good news is that she can spend time with her recently married daughter, Shannon, in Atlanta. The bad news is that Shannon finds herself heading to Boston for job training, leaving Sandy and her southern son-in-law, Chance, as reluctant roommates. If that’s not complicated enough, Sandy begins to suspect that her best friend’s boyfriend may be seeing another woman on the side.
I wanted to like this book. So much so that when my 21 days with Overdrive ran out before I had time to read a single line of it (hey! I'm a busy reader and I just checked out too many at once this time!) I checked it back out. Anyhow...
I felt like the book was kind of dragging along. I'm a quick reader and I tend to read 150 or so pages of whatever book at bedtime, more if I'm completely hooked (and not completely exhausted!). But I was reading this one only a chapter at a time. Which is why it took me a couple nights to reach 46%. I know it was 46% because that's what my Kindle Fire told me and also where I quit this book.
Backing up...The plot is basic about this woman who so desperately wants to move out of her family home and into something smaller, something fresh and new. In the process, she will be kicking her grown son out of her basement. Claire Cook switches between dialogue of the main character, Sandy, complaining that her family isn't doing enough to ready the house and flashbacks to when Sandy's children were young and the house was newly theirs. When an opportunity arises for Sandy to head to Atlanta to stage a hotel, she packs her bags (May I note that she does this without discussing the trip and extended stay with her husband. In fact she only tells him when he walks into the bedroom to find her packing.) and heads south.
Arriving in Atlanta she stays with her newlywed daughter, Shannon, and her son-in-law, Chance. For an unexplained reason she seems to despise Chance. She's just short of rude to her son-in-law (though it seems like up to this point she had been bitchy to everyone) with her only excuse being that she doesn't know what her daughter sees in him, though he is nice enough.
Back to way I stopped at 46%. Call me sensitive or defensive if you like. Upon arriving at her daughter's new home (which she also talks trash about), Sandy finds Shannon in the kitchen wearing omg! an apron while cooking dinner. Chance leaves the kitchen to sit in the living room while mother and daughter catch up. When Shannon announces that she needs to iron her husband's work shirt all hell breaks loose. Sandy embarks on a two page tangent on how she raised her daughter better than this, that women fought and died for the rights to equality that Shannon so clearly chooses to throw away, and why on earth did Sandy waste all that money on Shannon's education just to have it wasted. Seriously. All over cooking dinner for her mother's arrival, wearing an apron...to protect her clothes, and ironing her husband's shirt. Seriously. Oh but wait, Mom wearing just joshing you! Hahahahahahahaha CLICK, I am so beyond done with this book.
As I said, maybe I'm defensive but this just grated on my nerves. While yes I am a stay at home mom, my husband and I share responsibilities in the home. We did this before kids, before I left the work force and will continue to do it. I do wifey things for him, but he helps me with things as well. But even if I did all the "wife" duties, that doesn't make me a slave for my husband nor does it throw away women's rights. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing household things...besides someone has to do it right? What is Chance is a terrible at ironing? I know I am! What got me the most was when Sandy's blood boils over the whole thing. Why is it so terrible that her daughter did this one thing?
Anyway, this book was dry and in my case offensive. I wasn't very into it to begin with, but that whole thing just ended it for me. The cover was very pretty though. ;)
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