After having my boyfriend move in with his teenage boys and becoming engaged, I find myself attracted to books about family life and marriage. This book caught my attention with its clever cover, and the back containing an excerpt of the chance encounter between Maggie Owen, a woman raising two small children and living with her boyfriend Jake, and Claire, the girl she's idolized since high school. When Claire reenters Maggie's life, Maggie finds herself questioning her choices and constantly wondering about Claire's seemingly glamorous lifestyle. When Claire begins opening up to Maggie and confessing that she's worrying about time running out for her to have children of her own, she also reveals she's fallen in love with a married man and is currently dating another one. Maggie can't help but notice that Jake is spending a lot of late nights at the office and seems distant, and that the gardener that lives in Claire's basement keeps flirting...and she's starting to flirt back.
This book surprised me because just when I thought I had the characters figured out, something happened that surprised me. Durrant writes all of them believably, from the nosy mothers who join Maggie at the playground to Jake's seemingly chauvenistic friend Ed, who seems all to happy to drag Jake away from his family life. The ending is quite satisfying, although somewhat sad, as characters are forced to live with their choices and realize that the grass is indeed greener on the other side (regardless of who's in charge of gardening it).
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