Book Review: Mamarazzi

By Sara Steven

Danica Bennett knows exactly what it’s like to live a double life. At first glance, you might not notice her. She projects herself as nondescript, simple. She blends into the background and never makes a scene, which is why she’s so successful at her job. She’s "The Mamarazzi," a photographer famous for taking pictures of the rich and (in)famous. No one knows of her true identity, other than her somewhat loyal agent, a loyalty based upon royalties with each and every photo Danica takes. Money talks. Danica would much rather take legitimate photos, but no one will hire a nobody.

What if she became a somebody?

During a routine paparazzi stalking, Danica finds herself thrust into the spotlight by accident. There’s a new television show in the works, and suddenly she’s been cast as an extra, right next to Elliot Lane, the hot “it” actor. They have immediate chemistry, just what the industry is looking for. Is Elliot falling for Danica, or is he merely acting the part? Secrets can only stay safe for so long in Tinseltown. What will he do if he ever finds out that she’s really "The Mamarazzi?"

While I went into this book already a fan of Brooke Williams (I loved Accept This Dandelion), Mamarazzi is another great read from start to finish! I imagined myself in Danica’s shoes, wondering what it would be like to not only become one of the most notorious individuals to hide among the famous (paparazzi), but to also find myself suddenly part of the rich and famous crowd, my name in tabloids, everyone knowing my business even when it’s something I would have preferred been kept private. In my younger years, I used to wish for stardom, certain I’d find my way on the big screen. The older I got, though, the more I realized just how little privacy I’d have in my life. Mamarazzi is a gentle reminder of that. The grass isn’t always greener, that’s for sure.

This is a sweet love story twist, with a passion for life’s true calling sprinkled in. When you think you’re a nobody, you’re still a somebody. Even when you’re "The Mamarazzi."

Thanks to Brooke Williams for the book in exchange for an honest review. Visit Brooke on Facebook and at her blog.

Join the Sept. 15th Release Day Party on Facebook: Enjoy giveaways with a dozen different authors!

Add Mamarazzi to your Goodreads list. Also available to pre-order for 99 cents.

Purchase Accept This Dandelion for 99 cents through Friday, September 11th. Pre-order Dandelions on the Road (Dandelion Series Book 2), coming November 5th.

Cathy Lamb's very best literary friends...plus a book giveaway

One of the options we gave authors for "Friendship Month" was to share which Chick Lit characters would be their best friends. Cathy Lamb took us up on that challenge. Her latest novel has a fitting title for this month, as it is called My Very Best Friend. We've been hearing rave reviews for this book and are excited to feature Cathy today and share a copy with one lucky reader anywhere in the world, thanks to Kensington.

Cathy Lamb lives in Oregon. She spends a lot of time daydreaming. She has a wild imagination. Cathy is a bad skier and does not like to clean the house. Her husband says she “cooks by fire alarm.” As in, when the fire alarm goes off, that’s when she remembers to take the dinner out of the oven. She is working on her tenth novel. Her previous novels include: What I Remember Most, A Different Kind Of Normal, Such A Pretty Face, and The Last Time I Was Me. Visit Cathy at her website, Facebook, and Twitter.

A short and sweet synopsis of My Very Best Friend:
An old stone cottage in Scotland.
An overgrown garden. A man in a kilt.
Lingerie bike riding at midnight. Tea and crumpets.
Two best friends.
One is missing.

Who are the top five Chick Lit characters I’d want to be friends with? Well now. That’s not so hard to choose.

As a writer who spends a lot of time alone, fiddling around with my daydreams, talking in my head to characters as if they are real people, who eats too much chocolate and drinks too much coffee, I would have to say…

1. Sally and Gillian Owens of Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman.
 I love magic. I grew up on the Narnia stories and Practical Magic was an excellent adult extension without the lion and the talking beavers. If I hung out with Sally and Gillian and their aunts long enough maybe I could learn some spells and curses. It’s what I really need in my life: A tad bit of magic.

2. Cannie Shapiro of Good In Bed by Jennifer Weiner.
Cannie had a lot of wisdom. She’s the type of best friend you could stay up with all night and eat popcorn and watch funny movies and share all your secrets, and she would share hers, and then if you didn’t see each other for ten years, you could have another night of popcorn/secret sharing and you would still be best friends and everything would feel exactly the same in the relationship and no one would have spilled the other’s secrets even if a dragon was threatening to breathe fire upon you unless you told.

3. Kate Reddy of I Don’t Know How She Does it by Allison Pearson.
As a mother of three who works full time and has for years, I related to Kate. I laughed out loud at her complicated and semi – desperate thought processes – how to manage work and home and housework and kids and a husband, all at once - because I’ve had them so often myself. And that scene when she’s standing in front of a bunch of egotistical men at a meeting and doesn’t realize that her blouse is see through and her bra is red? Hilarious.

4. Bridget Jones of Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding. Who could pass up the late night dinners and city lights, the fast and furious conversations with her friends, the laughter, the craziness, the edge, the honesty? The granny panties? My life in suburbia could use a lift and some excitement. And I’ll take Colin Firth, too. Duh. Of course I’d take Colin Firth.

5. Andrea Sachs of The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger.
 I would want to be friends with Andrea before she left Vogue. I mean, well, not Vogue. The name Vogue is not in the book, but we all know that little secret is out of the bag. Anyhow, I would want to go to work with Andrea for one week and see how a magazine is put together. I’d want to learn about fashion and style because I know zero about it. Jeans and sweaters are good enough for me, but still. So interesting! But no more than a week at work with Andrea because I couldn’t stand her boss.


Thanks to Cathy for visiting with us today and to Kensington for the book to share with our readers.

How to win: Use Rafflecopter to enter the giveaway. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. If you have trouble using Rafflecopter on our blog, enter the giveaway here.


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Worldwide. Giveaway ends September 15th at midnight EST.

What's in the mail...plus a giveaway

Melissa A:

The Things We Keep by
Sally Hepworth from St. Martin's Press

After You by Jojo Moyes from Viking

The Edge of Lost by/from Kristina McMorris

Night Blindness by Susan Strecker from
St. Martin's Press

Amy:

Life and Other Near Death Experiences by Camille Pagán from Lake Union

What the Waves Know by Tamara Valentine from William Morrow

The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo from HarperCollins

Denise:

The Only Woman in the Room by Rita Lakin from Over the River Public Relations








What could be in YOUR mail:

The Invisibles 
by Cecilia Galante

William Morrow has one copy for a lucky US reader!

In the vein of Meg Donohue and Jennifer Close, comes Cecilia Galante’s adult debut about the complicated and powerful bonds of female friendship—a compelling, moving novel that is told in both the present and the past.

Thrown together by chance as teenagers at Turning Winds Home for Girls, Nora, Ozzie, Monica, and Grace quickly bond over their troubled pasts and form their own family which they dub The Invisibles. But when tragedy strikes after graduation, Nora is left to deal with the horrifying aftermath alone as the other three girls leave home and don’t look back.

Fourteen years later, Nora is living a quiet, single life working in the local library. She is content to focus on her collection of “first lines” (her favorite opening lines from novels) and her dog, Alice Walker, when out-of-the-blue Ozzie calls her on her thirty-second birthday. But after all these years, Ozzie hasn’t called her to wish a happy birthday. Instead, she tells Nora that Grace attempted suicide and is pleading for The Invisibles to convene again. Nora is torn: she is thrilled at the thought of being in touch with her friends, and yet she is hesitant at seeing these women after such a long and silent period of time. Bolstered by her friends at the library, Nora joins The Invisibles in Chicago for a reunion that sets off an extraordinary chain of events that will change each of their lives forever.

The Invisibles is an unforgettable novel that asks the questions: How much of our pasts define our present selves? And what does it take to let go of some of our most painful wounds and move on? (Synopsis courtesy of Amazon.)

**Visit Cecilia Galante on Facebook and Twitter**

How to win: Use Rafflecopter to enter the giveaway. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. If you have trouble using Rafflecopter on our blog, enter the giveaway here.

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US only. Giveaway ends September 9th at midnight EST.

Book Review: The Far End of Happy

By Gail Allison

You know those stories that draw you in and make you feel like you’re a part of the action, just sitting in a chair and watching everything happen as it unfolds? This one of those. And you know those weird dramas like 24 where everything happens in real-time and you’re like “whoa. This all just happened in the amount of time that ACTUALLY passed” when it’s over? This is also one of those. It’s not easy to read, and it’s not comfortable to sit through, but The Far End of Happy by Kathryn Craft is an amazingly well-told tale that, once you realize it’s loosely based on something the author actually lived through, will haunt you well after you’ve put it down.

Ronnie has been through a lot, and is finally starting to find her own feet. Today is the day that Jeff, her husband, should be moving out. He’s been fighting the divorce that Ronnie has been pushing for, and she has finally called it off. No more marriage. Unfortunately, when Ronnie gets up to start the day and get her sons off to school, something is a little off. The kitchen isn’t quite the way she left it. The guest room where Jeff has been sleeping is completely made up and devoid of life. When Ronnie and her sons realize that Jeff has pulled up to the house drunk, all hell starts to slowly break loose. Trying to maintain the facade of normalcy, Ronnie sends the boys to brush their teeth, calls the police when she realizes there’s a shotgun in the vehicle, and calls her mother to come and get the kids.

Told from the staggered viewpoints (but entirely in third-person, so there’s never any question of who the narrator is) of Ronnie, Ronnie’s mother Beverly, and Jeff’s mother Janet, you learn slowly who this person is who would endanger his kids, and why he feels that a suicide standoff with police is his only option at this point. Ronnie just wants to keep her kids safe, Beverly just wants Ronnie to be happy, and can’t understand quite what that would take at this point, and Janet want to see Jeff stop suffering, but doesn’t know how to help at this point. This story is a work of fiction, but it’s based on real-life events in the author’s life, and the story unfolds over the course of 12 hours. It’s tense, it’s engrossing, and it will make you think twice before you start insisting that you know what’s best for someone. It’s a stunning picture of the overlapping layers that make up a life story, and how two lives that seem so close can actually be miles apart.

This book is emotionally exhausting to read (seriously, have some Sophie Kinsella on standby), but it’s so worth it to immerse yourself in this story of how someone can slowly slip down the slope of depression. It’s so well written that you will find yourself empathizing with each and every one of the characters, and by the end you will put it down feeling completely drained, but agreeing that mental illness is not something to be taken lightly, and realizing a new-found respect for the people who are affected by it every day. The Far End of Happy by Kathryn Craft is gripping, tense, and will keep you glued to the pages until it’s over.

Thanks to Sourcebooks for the book in exchange for an honest review.

Elise Miller's shining star...plus a book giveaway

How many of you can say that your significant other is your best friend? How many of you have married someone with whom you started out as friends? How many of you are close friends with someone of the opposite gender? Elise A. Miller is here today to talk about how her husband and best friend are one and the same. Thanks to BookSparks, we have a copy of her debut novel, Star Craving Mad, for a lucky US reader.



Elise A. Miller discovered her talent and passion for writing by accident, during a short-lived but rigorous acting pursuit in the late 1990s. She immediately began studying writing in earnest at Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City, and hasn’t looked back since. Elise completed courses in advanced fiction, memoir, novel writing, stand-up comedy and screenwriting. In 2000, she published her first piece in The Sun Magazine, and in 2002 she was one of the founding members of Little Red Writing Group in Brooklyn. She later went on to publish personal essays in anthologies and literary journals. Elise lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, two kids and two teeny rescue dogs. She blogs about everything and anything at her website, about her personal fitness journey at bodyenta.com and about creative writing coaching at beechwoodwriters.com. You can also find her at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.


Synopsis of Star Craving Mad:
Maddy Braverman, thirty and single, has taught first grade at an elite private school in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village for the past six years. Angry at herself for not moving on, Maddy is distracted from her pity party with a new student—Lola Magdalena, daughter of A- list celebrities Nic and Shelby Seabolt—a last-minute addition to her class roster.

When Lola breaks her arm on the playground, Maddy has the chance to meet with Nic in his TriBeCa apartment. Maddy’s celebrity fantasies turn to reality—make out sessions, sex and even a Hamptons holiday bash that leave Maddy yearning for Nic’s love. (Courtesy of BookSparks.)


In Bryan’s Company

Growing up in an unhappy dysfunctional household meant that my friendships with girls were fragile—tenuous and easily breakable, laced with suspicions and back-stabbing. My mother didn’t have the time or resources to counsel me. Nervous breakdowns that left her crying in dark closets were more her thing. My father meanwhile busied himself with explosive tantrums, spurred on by the chaos that accompanies most children—messiness, noise and the inability to follow simple instructions.

My half-siblings from my mom’s first marriage were a decade older than me and had lives of their own. Their hobbies ranged from breaking petty laws and getting high to running away to the Jersey shore for days at a time. Maybe it’s no wonder that I gravitated toward friends who smelled like dirty laundry, read my diary and shared its contents with the entire third grade class.

Left to my own devices I developed an early obsession with romantic love, starting with a crush on Shaun Cassidy, which found me pressing my sticky glossed lips to his album cover. If you looked at my childhood as a recipe, stirred it with a move halfway across the country when I was twelve, you got one lopsided, pathetic soufflé. I was in no shape to have the kinds of girl friendships I read about and saw on television.

I was still, however, addicted to love. And like another popular song of my youth, I looked for it in all the wrong places.

After over a decade of misguided social navigation, during my senior year at Syracuse University, I finally had enough. A switch flicked somewhere deep in my psyche and I felt something I’d never experienced before—self-respect. For the first time I saw my own responsibility and culpability in my misery. I had slept with dozens of guys who clearly did not love or respect me. As for girls, I had counted bulimics and heavy drinkers among my coterie, of which here and there, I was one.

My life was too painful to keep mistreating myself. What’s more, I witnessed first-hand loving, mutually respectful relationships among college roommates and extended family.

Whether consciously or not, I was determined to be happy and mentally healthy. I entered therapy, read stacks of self-help books and started journaling; then writing memoir pieces about my childhood and adolescence, which blossomed into my writing career.

During this transition, I met my husband at a New Year’s Eve party. We’ve been together since January 1991. He’s stuck around while I grew out of old relationships and into new ones. He was there for my tears, pain and generally horrible behavior while I sorted out my past and eventually took up strength training and started taking medication. He’s supported my multitude of professional endeavors and eventually inspired the character James in Star Craving Mad.

Over the quarter-century that we’ve been together, he’s taught me how to be a friend—to him, to the girlfriends I have now, and most importantly, to myself. We joke together about annoying life circumstances, tackle home DIY projects, commiserate about the difficulty of parenting, hug frequently to our children’s embarrassment because as we say, “It’s important to hug,” and he brings me coffee on Saturday mornings.

In Bryan’s company I’ve cultivated the patience and wisdom to graciously endure the unsavory bits that accompany every relationship. As a result, I now have a small but hardy band of girlfriends who I can gossip with over long dinners and dance with until the sun rises.

Even the girlfriends I made and lost along the way, we’ve caught up to each other thanks to social media. And though they remind me of my less than optimal past, they also demonstrate the resilience and ultimate transcendence we are all capable of, in the name of friendship with others and with ourselves.

Thanks to Elise for sharing Bryan with us and BookSparks for sharing Star Craving Mad with our readers. This is part of their Summer Reading Challenge (#SRC2015).

How to win: Use Rafflecopter to enter the giveaway. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. If you have trouble using Rafflecopter on our blog, enter the giveaway here.

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US only. Giveaway ends September 8th at midnight EST.

Cover Reveal: Some Women

Emily Liebert was born and raised in New York City, attended the Horace Mann School and Smith College, where she graduated with a B.A. in English Language & Literature. After her first job as an Executive Assistant at ABC News, she became Editor-in-Chief of The WAG—a luxury lifestyle magazine covering Westchester and Fairfield Counties—where she wrote hundreds of articles, including celebrity profiles, travel, fashion, and beauty. From there, Emily became a full-time freelance writer, penning lifestyle pieces for media outlets such as, The Huffington Post and Oprah.com.

Emily's first book, Facebook Fairytales, was featured at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair, and Emily was one of 20 guests of honor at the renowned Literary Feast 2010, a privilege reserved for best-selling and buzz-worthy authors. In 2012, Emily wrote her debut novel, You Knew Me When (Penguin), which published on September 3, 2013. She followed that up with When We Fall, published on September 2, 2014. Those Secrets We Keep released this past June, and Some Women is due to publish in early April, but is available for pre-order. However we're sharing the cover and a synopsis right here! 

When Emily’s not writing, she teaches Pure Barre classes and enjoys traveling, cooking, and cozying up with a good book. She’s been known to ride on a Harley Davidson. And she does a mean Running Man on the dance floor. Emily lives with her husband, Lewis, and their two little boys in Westport, CT, where she moved kicking and screaming for fear that there would be no Chinese food delivery at three in the morning. She was right.

Visit Emily at her website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.


An engrossing and thought provoking novel that examines the intricacies of marriage, friendship, and the power of unexpected connections...

Annabel Ford has everything under control, devoting her time to her twin five-year-old boys and to keeping her household running seamlessly. So when her husband of a decade announces that he’s leaving her, without warning, she’s blindsided. And suddenly her world begins to unravel.

Single mother Piper Whitley has always done her best to balance it all—raising her daughter Fern by herself and advancing her career as a crime reporter. Only now that she’s finally met the man of her dreams, Fern’s absentee father arrives on the scene and throws everything into a tailspin.

Married to the heir of a thriving media conglomerate, Mackenzie Mead has many reasons to count her blessings. But with an imperious mother-in-law—who’s also her boss—and a husband with whom she can no longer seem to connect, something has to give.

On the surface, these three women may not have much in common. Yet when their lives are thrust together and unlikely friendships are formed—at a time when they all need someone to lean on—Annabel, Piper, and Mackenzie band together to help each navigate their new realities.

And now for the cover....

Friendship makes a difference to Leah Ferguson...plus a book giveaway

It's Friendship Month at Chick Lit Central! To help us kick it off, debut novelist Leah Ferguson is here to talk about one of her best friends. And Berkley has THREE copies of her novel, All the Difference, for some lucky US readers!

Born on Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland and raised in Carlisle, Leah Ferguson moved to Philadelphia for college, stayed there to work, thought about moving to San Francisco, and ended up in downtown Baltimore. She currently lives in Pennsylvania with her Baltimorean husband and two young daughters, toddler son, a very large husky and a tailless cat. Leah's focus is on women's fiction, and has a writing voice that is bright and sarcastic, introspective and thoughtful. All the Difference staretd out as a little NaNoWriMo project was edited to within an inch of its life over the course of three and a half years. Visit Leah at her website, Facebook, and Twitter.

Synopsis of All the Difference:
New Year’s Eve. A time for resolutions. A chance to make a change. And for thirty-year-old Molly Sullivan, a night that will transform her life forever…

All it takes is one word—yes or no—to decide Molly’s future. As the clock counts down to midnight and the ball slowly begins to drop, Molly’s picture-perfect boyfriend gets down on one knee and asks her to marry him. She knows she should say yes, especially considering the baby-sized surprise she just discovered she’s carrying. But something in her heart is telling her to say no…

Now, Molly’s future can follow two very different paths: one where she stays with her baby’s father, despite her misgivings and his family’s unreasonable expectations, and one where she ventures out on her own as a single mother, embracing all the hardships that come with it.

And by the time the next New Year is rung in, Molly will know which choice was right—following her head or listening to her heart... (Courtesy of Berkley Publishing.)

My Jenny

I’d like to talk with you about one of my best friends. She entered my world at one of the most crucial times in my life, and from the moment we met, our relationship grew together as easily as one of those crossword puzzles you find in the back of a trashy magazine and finish in three seconds flat. It didn’t take long for me to assume she was going to be one of those in-it-for-the-long-haul friends, the bestie I’d talk with as easily at sixty-five as I did when I was thirty-five. I figured she’d be the friend who cried on my shoulder now when our babies gave us trouble, and would do it again in twenty years when those same babies graduate from college. In my debut novel All the Difference, the main character, Molly, has a best friend named Jenny who’s been in her life for years. The woman I’m describing now was my Jenny: a friend-friend. The only, teeny problem? We don’t speak anymore. Yes, I’m confused, too.

We met in a library one day years ago after a mommy-and-me reading program. We had no business taking infants to this thing, but it was just so nice to get out and and interact with other human adults that it didn’t matter at all that our babies would rather chew on their carriers than listen to Corduroy. We ended up talking in the parking lot that morning for ages, and I found her fascinating. Her intense blue eyes held on to mine with interest. She wore Dansko clogs that I would never pull off in a million years, and when I admired a hat she placed onto her son’s head, she said that she’d knitted it herself, and that knitting wasn’t as hard as I thought (it is, I swear it is. So much counting). We were both former teachers, exhausted and worn out and so, so tired from the constant breastfeeding and endless nights and four walls of our own homes. We liked sugar, and baking, and reading up a storm. We were stay-at-home moms trying to find our way in this new wilderness of parenthood. When I ran into her a couple of weeks later at a different program (at a different library, no less. Desperate times call for desperate measures, you know) and found out she and her son went to the same music program I’d wanted to join with my daughter, I saw the look in her eye that recognized the thought in my heart: Ah, is what it said. Here might be my friend.

We had so much in common: the identity crises that came with leaving a service career where we impacted scores of kids in order to take care of one child, 24 hours a day. The slight resentment that mixed in with the love of our (admittedly kind, supportive, smart) husbands who got to leave the house for their jobs and travel and eat lunches that weren’t pb&j and Pirate’s Booty. The yearning for something else, something more—writing for me, a bakery for her—both of us knowing full well the guilty luxury of being able to actually choose what we’d want to do next, once the babies didn’t need us as much anymore. We both had a penchant for entertainment magazines (US Weekly for her, People for me), and could talk as deeply about Kim Kardashian’s butt as we did about No Child Left Behind. She read so, so much, and tore through books more quickly than she could recommend them to me, the former English teacher. She impressed me as much as she suited me.

So, yes, this friend and I had a lot in common: enough to make us close restaurants after meeting for dinner, than chat some more in the parking lot until we were the only ones standing in the dark beside our cars (which first were SUVs, then, as our families grew, minivans). But it was her encouragement of my dream that made her the friend—she was there in the beginning, encouraging me to write, reading my blog, talking, talking, talking about what could happen with the book. She was the one who knew and believed, but more importantly, asked. She asked questions, and listened to the answers. Most of us only half-listen to one another, ready to jump in with a response before the other person’s even finished her thought. My friend? She sat. She listened. She asked some more. If ever there was a light that went off in my head, it did with her—she was it. And the day she broke down in yet another parking lot—this time after a playdate at a local park—when she broke down into tears and just wept from exhaustion and possible depression and a horrible feeling of being done after her second daughter was born and refusing to sleep—that was the day, I believe, that I was her friend, too. For listening. For asking questions. For listening and asking some more. I became her friend-friend. I was her Jenny.

But we are not friends anymore, this woman and I. No, there was no fight. And nope, we didn’t have some big blow-up in the driveway of one our (old, small, “starter”) homes over a silly miscommunication. It just became…done. She suffered a personal loss, and grieved more than I understood at the time. I thought I was there for her, but looking back, it wasn’t enough. Then her husband got a great job in another state, and she moved. She stopped sending texts as often. I got pregnant with my third child, and the texts stopped altogether. She barely acknowledged my son’s birth. I sent her a first draft of my first novel, one she’d cheered, and she never read it. I still don’t know if she threw the manuscript out or if it’s hanging around her house in a drawer or if she just uses the blank sides of the papers to make grocery lists. After my son was born, I sent her an email—hormonal, sad, frightened of losing the friend I thought was the friend—asking if we could talk about what happened. I needed my friend. I missed her terribly. She was the one who’d text me at 11 p.m., chatting like we would at the dining table of each other’s houses. She’s the one I’d turn to with questions, and funny stories, and cries for help about this child behavior or that recipe. The void that was gone when she left—really left, I mean, body and spirit and texts and all—left a gaping hole. I’d counted on her to be my friend. Moreover, I thought we were. If she could just vanish like that—if she was okay if I vanished, too—were we ever friends at all?

In reply to that email, she said she was busy, she was sorry she wasn’t in touch, but that she’d try harder. That was the last I heard from her. We’re still friends on Facebook, though we never communicate. I see her pictures of her latest baby, #3, and of her newly pregnant belly, but never hit “like.” She must see news of the book release pop up on her feed, but I wouldn’t know it. I know I should cut ties completely, unfriend her, but I can’t. Not yet. I love to see her kids grow—the kids my children played with, squabbled with, splashed in the baby pool with. I want to see what baby she has next, what its name will be. She seems so happy. I hate that that makes me sad.

She was my friend once. She was my friend when we needed each other so. She was my cheerleader and my sounding board and my rock and my constant, pretense-free friend. She, though, was not my friend-friend. She isn’t my Jenny after all. But for a while there, she was pretty darned close, and I guess that’s as good as anything.

Thanks to Leah for sharing her thoughts on her friendship with us and to Berkley for sharing her book with our readers.

How to win: Use Rafflecopter to enter the giveaway. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. If you have trouble using Rafflecopter on our blog, enter the giveaway here.

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US only. Giveaway ends September 7th at midnight EST.