Flirting With Forty

I have already flirted with forty. In fact I became well acquainted with it -- and have now left it behind. But the Flirting With Forty I want to talk about today is Jane Porter's new book which is coming out in July.

I got to know Jane when she started writing for Harlequin Presents. She writes intense, dynamic dramatic Presents which are just about the opposite of the ones I write which tend to be lowkey, slightly flippant and understated (readers have not yet asked, Are those characters breathing? But I suspect my editor may have thought it once or twice). You always know that Jane's characters are breathing -- and emoting. Strong, powerful stuff.

I wondered what her first more mainstream book, The Frog Prince, was going to be like. I bought it right after it came out, took it to bed to read one night -- and barely got any sleep because I was so caught up in her heroine's life and plight and voice. It was so not the Jane from Presents. It was every bit as wonderful (actually, I think, more so, but I hate to play favorites with friends' books), but it was laugh-out-loud funny at times and terribly moving at others.

I gave a copy to my daughter when I went to Indianapolis with her last year to the NATA conference, and she needed her sleep because she was going going going every hour of the day in the way that conferences seem to require. But she, too, stayed up most of the night (sitting in the bathroom on the edge of the tub reading so she wouldn't wake me or her daughter in the hotel room). So -- The Frog Prince was a great book.

And now we have Flirting With Forty. We have Jackie, turning forty and trying to put her life back together after a divorce that changes every constant in her life. I feel blessed not to have experienced that in my own life. But I know -- and am related to -- plenty of women who have. So I found Jackie's experience to be devastatingly accurate and painful and funny and moving, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes in such quick succession that I simply reeled.

But that is what it's like, one of my dear friends assures me. And I believe her. I believed in Jackie -- in her insecurities and her worries and her tiny toehold on self-confidence, a toehold that grows into a solid staircase which she will ascend as she becomes her own woman. I believed, too, in her friends who didn't quite know what to do with her when she was still a member of their crowd, but didn't have the requisite husband anymore. I believed in their wanting to help, and then in their panic when she began to do things they weren't convinced were right. I believed in them when they came through at the right time -- when she most needed them. Women do that for each other -- even though they can be devastatingly brutal at other times.

There is a romance in Flirting With Forty. It's not the sort of romance that Jane writes when she writes Presents. It's secondary to Jackie's discovery of her own path to being her own person. But it is an integral part of the story -- and promises a future for Jackie far different than the one she'd once expected. And that, pretty much, is what life is all about.

How many of us ever have the lives we expected to have? How many of us meet people or make choices that take us in a completely different direction? How many of us have lives jolted out of their intended path when our spouse decides that our marriage isn't fulfilling anymore? And then what?

That's the question Jane Porter so deliberately asks -- and answers -- in Flirting With Forty. It's a fun book and an emotional book. It's one of those laugh-through-your-tears books. Because, after all, when life happens, what else can you do except take hold of it and make it the very best life you can?

Jackie did that.

Thanks, Jane. It was a great read!