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Good Housekeeping's view...
October 2009 Good Housekeeping selection.
Former Cosmopolitan editor Sam Baker has first-hand experience of the very tricky business
of stepmother-hood. Now in her 40s, she became a stepmother, ‘the most loathed of fairy-tale baddies’, at just 26. In this feisty female-support fiction, each of her group of five women – Eve, Clare, Mel, Mandy and Chloe – has her own way of managing the complexities of 21st-century family life – living with the ghosts of dead wives, looking after little ones, and nursing the big ones’ egos…
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Synopsis
The Stepmothers' Support Group by Sam Baker
You can't choose your family - but you can choose your friends...A heartfelt, warm and truthful novel about female friendship.
Eve has never imagined herself as a stepmother. But when she falls in love with Ian, he comes with a ready-made family of three children. And, to make matters worse, he's a widower. The ghost of his glamorous and well known wife haunts them. Clare, a teacher and single mother, is Eve's best friend. She is the only person Eve can talk to about how on earth a journalist in her thirties can win round three wary children. But despite Clare's years of practice with her own teenage daughter, it's Lily, her younger sister, who provides the truly sympathetic ear. Mel is sent along to Eve's so-called 'support group' by a colleague. With a fledgling relationship and a new business to get off the ground, she has a very different set of pressures to the other women. And Mandy is the stay-at-home mum, whose relationship comes with stepchildren, and who wants more than anything to stitch together a happy family life for herself, her kids and her new step-kids. As a cup of coffee turns to a bottle of wine and the get-togethers become a regular fixture, conversations about new families evolve into ones about relationships, life and each woman's deepest hopes and dreams. But the friendship is tested and feelings about lovers, husbands and step-children challenged when the five women are forced to confront new futures as well as unwelcome figures from the past...
Reviews
'Sometimes, a book can be such a brilliant idea you can't believe no one has done it before! Stepmothers, stepfathers, stepchildren: all will find amusement and comfort in its pages.'
Nigella Lawson
'This funny, touching novel by Red's editor is The First Wives Club meets Sex And The City - with stepchildren! Fast paced and unexpectedly moving.'
Red
'The narrative is well thought out with a great plot and likeable characters. Writing from the point of view of the Wicked Stepmother makes for an interesting and different read.'
Daily Mail
'In this feisty female-support fiction, each of her group of five women - Eve, Clare, Mel, Mandy and Chloe - has her own way of managing the complexities of 21st-century family life - living with the ghosts of dead wives, looking after the little ones, and nursing the big ones'
egos
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Good Housekeeping
'This hilarious novel addresses an inevitable question for step-parents: what if you din't get on with your partner's children?'
Hot Stars (OK
!) 'A great read with characters you can sympathise with.
Woman
'Her cracking novel is a stylish tale about what to do when you love him but don't love his kids. Rather cleverly she lays the old myth of the wicked stepmother to rest, or so we hope. Either way it's a super-sassy read.'
The Lady
'Baker charts the lives of four very different women, each embroiled in a family crisis, offering us a compelling, honest and moving view of motherhood, in all forms'
Psychologies
About the Author
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Born in Hampshire, Sam Baker studied politics at Birmingham University. She went on to work as a writer and editor for numerous British women's magazines, including Red, New Woman, Chat, and Take a Break.
After successfully re-launching the seminal teenage magazine Just Seventeen as J-17, Sam spent five years as editor of Company, then left to write her first novel Fashion Victim. She returned to magazines as editor of Cosmopolitan in the UK and is now editor-in-chief of Red.
Sam is a regular broadcaster on young women's issues as well as writing for numerous national newspapers. She is also the author of two previous novels, Fashion Victim and This Year's Model. Sam lives between Winchester, Hampshire and central London with her partner, the award-winning novelist Jon Courtenay Grimwood.
Photograph © Sarah Dunn
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Relationship Tales
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