Claire Cook's latest Novel, 'Best Staged Plans'
As a professional home stager, Sandy Sullivan is an expert at transforming cluttered rooms into attractive houses ready for sale. If only reinventing her life were as easy as choosing the perfect paint color. She’s eager to put her family’s suburban Boston home on the market, to downsize, and to simplify her own life. But she must first deal with her foot-dragging husband and her grown son, who has moved back home after college to inhabit the basement “bat cave.”
After reading them the riot act, Sandy takes a job staging a boutique hotel in Atlanta recently acquired by her best friend’s boyfriend. The good news is that she can spend time with her recently married daughter, Shannon, in Atlanta. The bad news is that Shannon finds herself heading to Boston for job training, leaving Sandy and her southern son-in-law, Chance, as reluctant roommates. If that’s not complicated enough, Sandy begins to suspect that her best friend’s boyfriend may be seeing another woman on the side.
Filled with characters who are fresh and original, yet recognizable enough to live in your neighborhood — plus plenty of great tips and tricks for fixing up houses, and lives — this is a wise and witty story of letting go and moving on. Best Staged Plans is Claire Cook at her most humorous and heartfelt.
Maureen Hancock's "The Medium Next Door"
Adventures of a Real-Life Ghost Whisperer
Library Journal
Hancock says she would like to be remembered as the girl next door with a twist—the twist being that she's a medium. As such, she has become famous enough for a possible Disney reality show (in the works for the fall 2011 season). Her narrative covers her personal life, her work as a medium, and self-help advice at the end of each chapter. Despite her own personal loss and Hancock's exposure to the grief of others, her book is full of hope and reassurance. Her revelations about being a medium and talking to the dead are much the same as those found in books by other mediums, e.g., Concetta Bertoldi and John Edward. All share engaging personalities and a positive message about what happens to us after death. Hancock's unusual background in holistic training (Reiki and Chinese medicine) and stand-up comedy gives her a slightly different outlook. VERDICT Hancock's moving book will attract anyone captivated by mediums and life after death.—Mary E. Jones, Los Angeles P.L.
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