Best Supporting Role
By Sue Margolis
ISBN# 9780451240132
Author’s Website www.suemargolis.com
Brought to you by OBS reviewer JoAnne
Synopsis:
When her gambling-addict husband died, Sarah Green was left penniless-and with two children to raise. Since then, she’s been left desperate to keep her professional and personal lives on firm financial footing. And what could be safer than dating an accountant and working at a non-emergency crime help line?
But then Sarah’s aunt dies, leaving Sarah her once-famous-now failing-lingerie shop. With her fashion background, Sarah reluctantly decides to make a go of it, even if that means breaking up with her too-prudent boyfriend over the risk.
Suddenly Sarah finds herself falling for Hugh, the handsome struggling actor she hires to renovate her new boutique, and entering a prestigious lingerie competition. Taking chances has never been her forte, but the built-in support of family and friends could give her the boost she’s looking for.
Review:
Sarah Green lives a comfortable life with her adman husband, Mike, and their two children, Dan and Ella, 8 and 5, respectively. Mike makes plenty of money, and Sarah, who before her marriage was an up-and-coming fashion designer, is happily renovating their new home, and is lucky she can afford to send her two children to a private school. When she discovers that Mike, who started gambling only to “blow off steam,” due to his stressful job, has taken it up full-time and put them in serious debt, her world begins to crumble around her. And when he dies in a freak accident one evening (the same evening she has decided to ask him for a divorce), her world completely falls apart.
She has no income, two fatherless children and is completely lost. She speaks to a friend who is a financial adviser, and he tells her that she must sell her beloved home and plan to ‘economize.’ While seriously trying to keep things together, she also finds out that her Aunt Shirley, her mother’s sister, is dying. To keep her mother happy, she goes to visit her aunt, and during the visit, Shirley sort-of extracts a promise from her: that Sarah take over Shirley’s failing lingerie shop and try to make a go of it.
Sarah, who has for months lived with the fear of having nothing because of Mike’s gambling, and has nearly ended up that way, is determined to sell the shop for what she can get out of it and try to move on. But when a sudden windfall – almost a last gift from Shirley – comes her way, she realizes that she has a chance to try. We are with her as she tries to find her way after Mike’s death; her obligation to keep her childrens’ lives stable, and to find some stability in her own life while juggling a fledgling business and a budding relationship.
Although this would by no means be catalogued as a ‘fun’ read, it is a genial one, well-written and with depth; it is a book filled with hopes, dreams, loss, renewal, and ultimately the satisfaction that comes with finding a place to call home, which doesn’t always mean a house.
Highly recommended.
