The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

A thoroughly researched, eye-opening study of the deep value platonic friendships can hold in enriching and empowering personal lives.  

In her first book, The Other Significant Others, Rhaina Cohen, an NPR editor and producer, presents an eye-opening exploration into the many ways friendship, in various forms, can enrich and empower lives for the better. 

In 2022, Cohen attended six weddings in six months. Amidst these pandemic-deferred nuptial celebrations, where couples vowed to spend the rest of their lives together as a “we,” Cohen began to question societal expectations of love and its meaning. Was sex the essential component of a truly committed relationship? Was a person’s life somehow incomplete without a long-term romantic partner? Cohen, married, had always felt that friendships “electrified” her life. Thus, she began to examine the “we” of friendship: what draws people together on a purely platonic plane? What made some friendships endure despite the parties not formally professing a long-term commitment to each other?

 

Cohen presents stories from her own life--along with other historical and contemporary case studies--that deconstruct diverse friendships of all stripes. These include people of varying ages, races, genders, marital states, sexual orientations, and religions. She delves into co-parenting friends; shared homeowners; friends who serve as executors of estates; and even those who act as primary caregivers, helping to shoulder the demands and burdens imposed by illness and debilitating medical treatments.

 

Cohen’s well-researched, appealingly structured narrative stretches modern assumptions of love, making the case that a life bonded by friendship can hold limitless potential for a more fulfilling, deeply meaningful existence.

 

The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Cohen

St. Martin’s Press (Macmillan), $29.00 hardcover, 9781250280916, 320 pages

Publishing Date: February 13, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (February 23, 2024), link HERE 

The Little French Bridal Shop

A heartfelt story about a down-on-her-luck single woman who has an awakening after committing a sin of omission.

Tender moments add levity to Jennifer Dupee’s greatly appealing first novel. The story focuses on Larisa Pearl--pushing 40-years-old--who losses her job in Boston, breaks up with her boyfriend and learns that her 96-year-old aunt--her father’s sister; a spinster--has died and left her house, “Elmhurst,” to Larisa and her father. Larisa’s parents live in a New Hampshire retirement community, where her mother is battling dementia and her devoted father is lovingly committed to her daily care. This leaves Larisa to set off on her own to Elmhurst, located in the small seaside town of Kent Crossing, Mass. Elmhurst is in need of repair. Thus, she enlists the help of Jack Merrill--a disillusioned, married father of triplets, in his late 30s--the part-time caretaker of the estate. Larisa and Jack were friends who grew up together, spending memorable summers at Elmhurst.

While grappling with her mother’s deteriorating health and re-acquainting herself with the allure of small-town life, Larisa decides--on a lark--to try on a beautiful wedding gown displayed in the window of the local bridal shop. Unbeknownst to Larisa, the shop owner is one of her former teachers, now retired, who happily presumes Larisa is finally getting married. Not wanting to disappoint, Larisa gets roped into the assumption. This choice escalates in hard-won ways that challenge Larisa’s perceptions of happiness and love.

Dupee successfully combines the pull-and-tug of romance with family drama to deliver a more serious message about facing up to the often-harsh realities of life.

 

The Little French Bridal Shop: A Novel by Jennifer Dupee

St. Martin’s Press, $26.99 Hardcover, 9781250271525, 304 pages

Publication Date: March 9, 2021

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (March 9, 2021), link HERE

Truth, Lies, and Second Dates

A snarky romance--and well-crafted whodunnit--about a successful airline pilot forced to revisit the long-ago murder of her best friend.

MaryJanice Davidson (The Love Scam) writes romance across genres, from comedy to horror to paranormal. In Truth, Lies, and Second Dates, she incorporates elements of a thriller. Ava Capp is a snarky, flawed heroine with an unresolved past. Not yet 30 years old, Ava is already an accomplished pilot for a commercial airline. Her need to fly away began years before. As a teenager, she and her best friend, Danielle, were inseparable--until Danielle was brutally murdered when the girls were 16. The tragic loss of Danielle and her unsolved murder led Ava to abuse drugs and alcohol, until she dried out, turned her life around and became a pilot--one plagued with romantic commitment issues.

 

One day, on a routine flight, she crosses paths with Danielle's twin brother, Dennis, who invites Ava to a 10-year memorial service for his sister. The invitation brings Ava back to her hometown, Minneapolis, Minn., where she's welcomed coolly by Danielle's family--especially by her mother, who still suspects Ava killed her daughter. When things go dreadfully awry at the service, and Ava leaves abruptly, she meets Dr. Tom Baker. When Baker was 13, the grisly murder of Danielle intrigued him so much that it launched him into a career as a medical examiner. As Ava and Tom strike up a friendship (on the way to romance), mysterious happenings resurrect the past and begin to threaten Ava's sanity and safety.

 

Readers will root for the flawed heroine and the pull of romance. However, they'll be more apt to keep turning pages, eager to solve the suspenseful whodunnit embroiled in the midst of it all.

Truth, Lies and Second Dates: A Novel by MaryJanice Davidson

St. Martin’s Griffin, $16.00 Paperback, 9781250053176, 320 pages

Publication Date: December 15, 2020

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (December 29, 2020), link HERE

Cat Flap

A successful, British executive--a wife and mother--has her mind and soul metamorphosed into the family cat.

In his novel Cat Flap, British journalist Alan S. Cowell presents a modern fable: Dolores Tremayne--wife, mother and a successful corporate executive of African British descent--wakes one day and discovers that part of her has migrated and metamorphosed into the body of the family's "finely bred, highly pedigreed" indoor cat.

The human Dolores sets off on a Lufthansa flight bound for a high-powered business meeting with a prestigious car company in Munich, Germany. Her feline self--her mind and soul, aka "X"--stays behind and gains a surprising glimpse into the daily life of her sexy, white husband, Gerald, a former drug dealer-user and stalled novelist. His first book had been "well-received, if not well sold or marketed" and a three-book commitment looms over him, along with his daily, demanding responsibilities as a house-husband to his and Dolores's two little girls.

One day, when Gerald exits the apartment, curious X slips out and follows him. She discovers that he is a serial philanderer juggling numerous shocking exploits. Being trapped in the body of a cat shutters all of Dolores's emotional human instincts and reactions. However, through some creative ingenuity, X and human Dolores join forces as avenging spirits.

Cowell (The Terminal Spy) has never shied away from exploring dark themes in his writing--those found in newspaper journalism, politics, war, risk taking and spying. Readers will eagerly suspend their disbelief, immersing themselves in Cowell's cleverly conceived, satirical novel that probes contemporary issues of race, identity and sexuality. 

Cat Flap by Alan S. Cowell

St. Martin's Press, $24.99, Hardcover, 978125014659, 240 pages

Publication Date: July 31, 2018

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (August 3, 2018), link HERE

Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks

Rock journalist Stephen Davis documents the rise of singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks, solo artist and member of the iconic Fleetwood Mac.

Forty-odd years ago, Stevie Nicks, the "Fairy Godmother of Rock," seemed to emerge from nowhere with a song about an old Welsh witch, "Rhiannon." The song has since become a classic, one of the most popular songs Nicks ever recorded with the British band Fleetwood Mac. With reverent care, Stephen Davis (Hammer of the Gods, about Led Zeppelin) closely examines Nicks's formative years, the struggles of her early, ascendant career, and how her emotionally charged affiliation with Fleetwood Mac changed her life. Her music--popular songs that deal with memories, dreams, romance, regret and the passing of time--corresponds to important aspects of the singer-songwriter's life. With that in mind, Davis deconstructs the music to trace Nicks's childhood and musical roots. He analyzes her tumultuous relationship with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, and her cocaine-infused heyday in Fleetwood Mac, complete with juicy dramas about romantic entanglements in the band and affairs she had with others, including rock stars Don Henley and Joe Walsh. Furthermore, Davis considers the forces that ultimately empowered Nicks to take the leap and launch a solo career.

Meticulously presented details are fortified by quotes from Nicks, her family and friends and other musical cohorts. Davis documents, in depth, the influences--good and bad, the mystical and magical--that shaped the rock legend. He details how personal experiences of love, heartbreak and loss directly contributed to her astounding success and longevity in the limelight. Fans of Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks will find much to savor in this intimate, comprehensive biography.

Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis

St. Martin's Press, $27.99 Hardcover,  9781250032898, 352  pages

Publication Date: November 21, 2017

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (January 9, 2018), link HERE

Jill Paton Walsh: The Legacy of Dorothy L. Sayers

The Writer's Life

Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the greatest mystery writers of the 20th century. Her most notable creation was the aristocratic, eccentric sleuth Lord Peter--and later, Harriet Vane, the hyper-intelligent writer of detective novels who would become Lord Peter's wife. In 1936, Sayers abandoned the series. After her death in 1957, a partial manuscript and notes for a Lord Peter novel--what would become Thrones, Dominations, were found. It wasn't until many years later that Sayers's literary trustees commissioned Jill Paton Walsh--at the suggestion of Hope Dellon, an editor at St. Martin's Press--to complete the novel, which was published in 1998.

Walsh, the Booker Prize-nominated and Whitbread Prize-winning author of many novels for adults and children, has since written three additional books in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, including A Presumption of Death and The Attenbury Emeralds. In The Late Scholar (published by Minotaur), Peter and Harriet once again return to the page, post-World War II. In this installment, Peter is asked by his alma mater, St. Severin's College, Oxford University, to help resolve a dispute involving a valuable rare manuscript that needs to be sold in order to raise funds. But when the clever couple arrive at the college, they are faced with a string of mysterious deaths of faculty members.

Were you always a fan of Dorothy Sayers's work? What was your first experience with her writing?
My first experience with Sayers's work was when I was about 14 years old. I read Even the Parrot, a book for children, and managed to like it, though it's very patronizing. Then I moved on and fell in love with Lord Peter. When I read Strong Poison, the first Lord Peter book that features Harriet Vane, I noticed the unusual attitude of Lord Peter to a clever woman. I gave him my heart at once, and he helped inoculate me against the attentions of the men in my generation who wanted a woman chiefly to iron their shirts.

Were you intimidated by taking over the writing of the very successful Lord Peter series?
Yes, of course, I was intimidated... I still am. But it has been an irresistible challenge to my technical skills.

With Thrones, Dominations, you are considered a "co-author" with Dorothy Sayers. Were the notes she left behind easy to follow in finishing the story?
The materials left by Sayers consisted of about one-fifth of the length of the finished novel, in chapters not numbered in order. There were several versions of some of the scenes. There was a plot diagram, down a single page, showing a line for Peter and Harriet and a line for Murderer and Victim. It was annotated with the words "Moves and countermoves as many as may be necessary" and "little bump of emotional development leads to solution." The written part left behind did not get as far as the murder. It was not easy to decipher.

How much influence do the literary trustees of the Dorothy Sayers Society have over the content of each book? Have they ever asked you to rework or rewrite parts of the story?
The trustees are lawyers advised by a literary agent. They have not offered any literary comment or advice, and I would not agree to work under such supervision. But the publisher also has discretion to publish or not to publish, and I accept editorial advice from the publisher as I would with a work entirely my own.

How do you research each book, especially The Late Scholar, which is set mostly on the campus of your alma mater, Oxford University?
Each book is different. They all require some research into the historical setting. The Late Scholar needed very little research, just some checking, because it is set somewhere in 1952-1953, and I went to Oxford in 1955. Peter's life and mine nearly overlap there.

What's the most challenging part of continuing the series? What's the most enjoyable and rewarding?
Writing about someone else's characters imposes a duty to correctness about what is already written about them, as though they were real people. Peter is the most entertaining man possible to imagine, talking in my inner world. He's just fun.

Do you have a favorite book in the Lord Peter series?
Gaudy Night is my favorite--it would be, it's about Oxford, and it's about women with professional careers. But I think the best of the series is The Nine Tailors, even though it had no Harriet Vane for me to identify with.

How hard is it to keep updating the series with recurrent characters, now aging, and moving into a more contemporary, post-World War II era?
It's easier, actually, than writing about characters who do not grow and change. Characters need to be real to me before I can make them real to anybody else, and real people change over time.

Why do you think Lord Peter and Harriet Vane have gained and retained such a loyal and devoted following throughout the years?
Peter is very unusual in needing an intellectual equal for his wife. I can think of two others in literature: Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing and Ralph Touchett in A Portrait of a Lady. Sayers produced a picture of a deeply desirable relationship between a man and a woman--clever, passionate and mutually respectful.

If someone has never read a Lord Peter novel, which one do you suggest they read first? And what do you foresee for the future of the Lord Peter series?
I'd suggest Strong Poison--if someone likes this book, they will like them all. And in terms of Lord Peter's future, he seems to be immortal. Really, doesn't he?

Will there be another Imogen Quy novel? Also, will you write another children's book?
Yes, I do plan to return to the Imogen Quy series. I would also love to get a good idea for another children's book. But my own children are now in their 50s, and my grandchildren are growing up in Australia. I haven't enough contact with children to know in my bones what they like reading... just the same, I'd grab the chance if something promising occurred to me.

If you could meet Dorothy Sayers, what would you like to say to her?
I would be rather afraid of her--such a sharp and clever woman. But I would ask why she abandoned Thrones, Dominations.

Note: This interview is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this Q&A on Shelf Awareness (6/17/14), click HERE

Mary Kay Andrews: Creating Her Own World Order

The Writer's Life

photo: Bill Miles

Mary Kay Andrews started her career as a journalist, covering what would later become known as the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil murder trial. After leaving the newspaper business, she turned to writing cozy mystery novels, including the Callahan Garrity series about a former cop–turned–struggling private eye–turned cleaning lady. After 10 mysteries, Andrews began writing women's fiction.

Christmas Bliss (St. Martin's Press, $16.99) is her latest--her 21st book, and the fourth in the Savannah series--more adventures featuring Eloise "Weezie" Foley and her Southern belle best friend, BeBe Loudermilk. Weezie is an antique dealer who has a cheating ex, an alcoholic mother, a forgetful father and a gay uncle who was a Catholic priest. BeBe is a thrice-married restaurant owner who is now expecting a baby. In Christmas Bliss, Weezie is pulled in many directions as she prepares for the holidays and her impending Christmas Eve nuptials to her long-time love, a chef suddenly being wooed by the New York restaurant scene.

Andrews's novels offer an absurdist, comic slant on serious issues, where quirky characters merge with plots that are always full of surprises, laughs and heartwarming endings.

How did the Savannah books come about? Did you know from the start this was going to be a series?

Savannah, Ga., was where my husband and I started life as newlyweds--way back when. It's truly a place of my heart. Evocative, parochial and dripping with Spanish moss and Southern charm. I had no intention of writing a series because I'd just ended the Callahan Garrity mystery series, with eight installments.

How do you come up with the clever names of your heroines, especially those in the Savannah novels?

Weezie is named after the heroine of the Kay Thompson's Eloise children's books, which I've always loved. I heard an Atlanta socialite referring to her youngest child as "bay-bay," which she informed me was French for baby--and I knew I would steal that for a character.

And speaking of names, your Callahan Garrity mysteries (published under the name Kathy Hogan Trocheck) have been re-issued under your name. Will you ever return to writing about Callahan?

I loved writing about Callahan and Edna and the House Mouse "girls," and I do sometimes miss them, so who knows? Maybe someday they'll reappear. After 21 books, I've learned never to say never.

You've delivered, on average, a book a year. How do you remain so prolific?

Fear is a great motivator. If I'm not working on a new novel, I start to worry that my readers will forget me and move on to the next hot thing. This past year was a two-book year, with the release of Ladies' Night and Christmas Bliss within five months of each other. Not a feat I want to repeat. Maybe it's the good Catholic girl syndrome that Nora Roberts talks about. You sign a contract, you deliver the goods. I always tell my agent I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Does your Catholic upbringing and faith inform your work?

I'm sure my faith informs my work--hopefully in subtle ways. I believe in family, in faith, in faithfulness. I want the world to be fair, and I dislike bigotry, gratuitous violence and cruelty. I suppose writing fiction is my way of creating my own world order.

If a character from any one of your books could live off the page, which one would you most like to spend time with and why? Is there any character you would try to avoid?

Mary Bliss McGowan, the protagonist of Little Bitty Lies who faked her husband's death in a boating accident, is somebody I'd like to share a drink with. I admire her gutsiness. Scheming, conniving females like Celia Wakefield, the romantic rival in Spring Fever, give me a rash. I'm always wary of women who distrust other women.

How has your journalism background influenced your career as a novelist?

Being a reporter teaches you to ask the hard questions and pay attention to the answers--not just listening, but watching. It teaches you the importance of story structure--beginning, middle and end. It teaches you there's no such thing as writer's block. And you learn the incredibly important skill of working with a good editor, allowing the give-and-take that can lift a so-so piece of prose into something special--or at least something that doesn't suck.

You're passionate about "extreme junking," the search for antiques at flea markets and estate sales--in real life and in your novels. Do you tend to keep things you find and restore, or has eBay become your best friend?

My mother was a junker, and as an impoverished child bride of 22, I learned that I could make a home with somebody else's cast-offs. I've been junking ever since, keeping what I love or passing it along to my grown children or even selling it in my booth in a gift shop on Tybee Island, outside of Savannah. I'm too impatient to wait on the outcome of an eBay auction.

Why do reinvention and the idea of "home" (literally and figuratively) figure so prominently as themes in most of your books?

Most of my readers are women, but I think all of us, deep down, long for home--for that sense of belonging, of being rooted in something, whether it's a physical place, or just an emotional attachment to someone or something. And reinvention is universal, too. Who doesn't dream of having a do-over in life?

You've had a long, varied and prosperous career. Is there anything else you'd still like to explore in your writing?

I joke about my evil plot for global domination, but sure, I'd like to try my hand at writing a screenplay and seeing my story on a big screen--or even a small screen. I've got a cookbook simmering at the back of my mind, and it would be really cool to write a children's book, too. So many ideas, so few hours....

What can readers expect from you next?

I'm working on next summer's book, set in Savannah, with a protagonist who is a wedding florist. Look for Save the Date in early June! 

Note: This interview is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this Q&A on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (12/17/13), click HERE

Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger

Love and its many contemporary complications have become the hallmarks of Beth Harbison's cleverly titled novels. In Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger, a single woman is forced to come to terms with two brothers who broke her heart ten years before. Harbison sets up a love triangle that's sure to please fans of entertaining, light-hearted women's fiction.

In this story, small town girl Quinn Barton had every intention of marrying her high school sweetheart, Burke Morrison. Moments before she is to walk down the aisle, however, her brother-in-law Frank pulls the twenty-one year-old bride aside and announces that Burke, his brother, has been cheating on her. Quinn, appalled, calls off the wedding and has a short-lived rebound relationship with Frank that ultimately fizzles. For the next ten years, with the boys having departed their Middleburg, Virginia hometown, Quinn stays behind, married to her job running a local bridal shop.

When Burke and Frank's eccentric, 82 year-old grandmother decides to marry again, she hires Quinn to make her wedding gown. Might this be a scheme to lure the boys back to town? When they arrive for the ceremony, and to tie up loose ends on the family farm, Quinn realizes the story of the Morrison brothers and the depth of her feelings for them, are not really over - and vice-versa.

Harbison (When in Doubt, Add Butter) has once again created an endearing, humorous story with laugh out loud twist and turns. The interior intimacy of her witty, first person point of view protagonist leads readers on a well-balanced, romantic journey from true love to heartbreak - and back again.

Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger by Beth Harbison

St. Martin's Press, $25.99, hardcover, 9780312599133 , 384 pp

Publication Date: July 9, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (7/9/13), click HERE

The Ghost Horse

In The Ghost Horse: A True Story of Love, Death and Redemption, Joe Layden (The Last Great Fight) has crafted an inspiring love story infused with fate and coincidence, second chances and hope.

Tim Snyder was a gruff, nomadic horseman who fled hardscrabble beginnings to train "cheap horses." While working in a second-tier horse barn in upstate New York, a runaway colt in his care knocked over his quiet, unassuming coworker, Lisa Calley, with whom he became instantly smitten--and vice-versa. Lisa, ten years younger than Tim, had already survived a broken marriage, cancer and a traumatic brain injury from a previous horse riding incident. Their shared passion for horses united them as they built a married life together; her emotional sensitivity ultimately softened his unsentimental rough edges.

When Lisa's cancer returned, she promised Tim, "I'll see you again. I'm coming back as a horse." Her death left a gaping hole in her husband until, years later, he scraped together enough money to purchase a filly whose winning pedigree was offset by a sightless left eye and congenital abnormalities in her left foot and shoulders. No one but Tim believed she would ever make it to the starting gate. But "Lisa's Booby Trap," as Tim named her, took the racing world by storm, and their bond helped Tim rebound from grief and loneliness. He came to believe the filly's personality reflected the sweet, resilient disposition of his late wife.

Layden has teamed up with a variety of superstars to co-write many books, from Kobe Bryant of the NBA to heavy metal superstar, Dave Mustaine. In The Ghost Horse, Layden's writing shines on its own - insight and compassion weaving the narrative threads of this dual love story that transcends the boundaries of life and death. 

The Ghost Horse: A True Story of Love, Death and Redemption by Joe Layden

St. Martin's Press, $24.99 Hardcover, 9780312643324, 256 pp

Publication Date: May 7, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note:  This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (5/21/13), click HERE