Belonging

The other reviews give you an outline of the story in this book so I will not recreate the wheel by doing it again, I will just make my comments on the book. I like it a lot but sometimes it does not add up too good. The strange connection to Doug Snow, the carpenter, and the unexplained sinister nature she paints him with don't seem to add up; for that matter neither does his son. Its like she is painting a picture of someone she actually knows and she knows him so well, she forgets to tell us some of the important parts which apparently are just obvious to her. Also the love with Jake her boss is foreshadowed early in the book but never really developed. He is a high-powered network dude yet he acts like a real country bumpkin/father figure to our heroine and even though you know he is love with her its because you guess it, not because the author fleshes it out. I love Madaket, she is real and a delicious character. Her relationship with studly Troy is never delineated very well though; and again, you can guess about her and Gardner but its not well pictured. Joanna Jones is sort of the person we all wish we could be in her success and beauty and early good fortune. But her dark side is her relationship with the snooty and married Carter and then her weird way of dealing with the pregnancy. It seems somewhat preposterous. And what about Torie? She is the conscience yet its almost like the author is saying, "she gets her come-uppance in the end," or "I told you so." She is the champion of marriage and family yet loses her husband and home to the wiles of a younger woman and is often depicted as bitter and crabby in her relationship with her "best friend" Joanna. I liked this book and would read more Thayer. I would give it a B+.

There are few women with the insight to write such a profound book. We are a complex species and Ms. Thayer does a wonderful job of not only portraying our wide range of emotions but evoking them from ourselves. This is indeed a rare gift. I picked this book up as a light summer read not expecting to be inspired to do my own soul searching such that the main character Joanna does. Congratulations are in order for Ms. Thayer and for the women who read this book and discover the meaning with in it.

This is the second book of Ms. Thayer's I have read and I like both novels; enough to want to read her again. In this book, you have a woman who goes through many changes in her life (some quite unexpected) and how she evolves 180 degrees from where she started. By the end of the book she has melded the two wonderful lives she has created and in doing so, she has discovered what really matters in life.

This is one of those books where I was completely caught up in the story. It is definitely a LAUGH and CRY book. If I knew how, I would plead with OPRAH to make it her next pick. This is the first I've read from Nancy Thayer and I hope she is currently involved with her NEXT offering. I'm also in the process of searching out my next NANCY THAYER novel from the one's I've already misse