“The Summerhouse” 

               By Jude Deveraux                                                                                                           

2011 Book Review # 114

Book List Review

Serendipity brings three career women together at the DMV in New York City on their twenty-first birthdays. Ellie, cute and perky, is a hopeful artist. Leslie is an aspiring dancer, and Madison is in New York to pursue a modeling career.

Nineteen years later, Ellie, a successful popular fiction writer who hasn't written for three years, asks the other two to meet at a summerhouse in Maine to find out if their lives went as wrong as hers.

Beautiful Madison tells the group about giving up modeling to nurse an ungrateful husband and Leslie talks about leaving the dance world to marry the boy back home, who now may be cheating on her. But neither is as bitter about men as Ellie, whose ex-husband has taken all her money and her self-confidence.

The catharsis achieved by their confessions is helpful, but what really changes their lives is the mysterious Madame Zoya, who promises to let them relive any three weeks of their lives and to choose a new path or remain with the old.

Deveraux is at the top of her game here as she uses the time-travel motif that was so popular in A Knight in Shining Armor (1996), successfully updating it with a female buddy twist that will make fans smile.

My Thoughts:  A different kind of book for me, but I liked it.  No blood or gore, but plenty of human feelings and a little magic.  It’s interesting to see what choices are made in these women’s lives when they are given a "second chance".