From Publishers Weekly
Sisters Sam and Libby, although two years apart, were once as close as twins. Now, at 38 and 40, they haven't spoken in six years, and each has learned that "the future you'd planned for could be altered beyond imagination." At the start of this domestic drama by LeClaire (
Entering Normal;
Leaving Eden), Sam has become a successful pastry chef and proprietor of her own business. She's also tentatively involved in a new romance after a divorce left her brokenhearted. Libby, once a rebellious teen idolized by her younger sister, has been living a comfortable suburban life with her husband, Richard, a music professor with a trust fund. Then her world turns upside down when she is diagnosed with a rare kidney disease. Desperate for an organ donor, Libby breaks the silence with her sister. Will Sam, who's been called "stubborn as a mule in mud," forgive Libby for the role she played in Sam's divorce and respond to her sister's plea? LeClaire has a smooth touch, and Sam is winningly sweet, but uninspired dialogue and a paint-by-the-numbers plot make this tale of sisterly love and reconciliation slow going.
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From Booklist
There is never a false note in LeClaire's heartfelt novels: they are full of sentiment; smoothly, even elegantly, written; and they always require a couple of hankies. Libby and Sam are sisters, estranged for a half-dozen years, but as children they were deliciously and deliriously close, as only siblings near in age can be. Sam lives in Massachusetts and makes her living devising exquisite wedding cakes. Libby is in Chicago, her children away at college and her musician husband remote, wondering how it came to this.
This, we learn,
is the revelation that Libby has a rare kidney disease. The minutiae of dialysis may prove a bit too vivid for some, but LeClaire is also a master of the minutiae of a lover's touch and of the random tenderness children can show to parents. The three-hanky climax will satisfy without heartbreak.
GraceAnne DeCandidoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
