Best Staged Plans

In Best Staged Plans (#87) Claire Cook tackles a woman's mid-life crisis.  Sandy is a professional stager, prepping houses to show to their best advantage in the competetive real estate market.  She has a retired husband and two grown children:  Luke, who is currently living in their basement without any indication that he will ever permanently move out, and daughter Shannon, happily married in Atlanta.  Sandy also has a gorgeous restored Victorian mansion a short walk from a quaint harbor in a town just south of Boston.  What's not to like about her life?  Apparently everything. 

I must admit that although I have thoroughly enjoyed Claire Cook's other books, I found Best Staged Plans somewhat of a disappointment.  Sandy's discontent with her life and her relationships is irritating and incomprehensible except for her dependence on her reading glasses.  That I totally understand.  But why is she so dead set on putting her house on the market (if only her husband and son would do the tasks she's assigned for them!) when she has no idea what she wants to do afterwards?  No plans for an area to relocate to, or to travel to, or to change her career...  Why the rush, as her husband wants to know?  Especially since most of the nostalgic flashbacks in the book concern this very same house.  Since things aren't going well on the home front (where she has a running feud with a nasty postal clerk) Sandra decides to take on a job for her best friend's current boy friend - staging a boutique hotel in Atlanta he's just bought sight unseen.  This has the added advantage of allowing her to stay with her newly married daughter in Atlanta (and is that ever a good idea?  to horn in on newlyweds unasked?).  Turns out Shannon is headed to Boston for corporate training for a month, leaving Sandra alone in the house with her son-in-law whom she cannot abide.  This was also a mystery to me.  Chance seems like a nice enough guy, truly devoted to her daughter; what more could a mother want?  Since Sandra rides roughshod over her client's opinions on decorating his new hotel (and let's call a spade a spade; she's doing the interior design work for the hotel) while ratting him out to her best friend when Sandra sees him with another woman, I have to think Sandra is the biggest control freak going.  That doesn't make her a very sympathetic character in my book until she encounters a homeless woman named Naomi and actually does something to help her.

I definitely could have done without the details of Sandy's "beloved" pets' demises - ew!  I also found the number and frequency of texting abbreviations employed intensely irritating.  Since I'm apparently not hip enough (or whatever the current term is) to recognize more than a few, I simply gave up trying to translate.  So sue me. 

Now that I've gotten all that out of the way, am I sorry I read this book?  No, not at all.  I just think I might have set my expectations too high.  And kudos to Ms. Cook for trying to make a difference.  In this book she is encouraging her readers to donate their unused reading glasses to charity.  She cites a statistic in the book that it is difficult for workers over the age of 40 to obtain employment if they can't see well enough to fill out the job application.  Thought provoking, and something many readers will be in a position to do something about.  I've included a link to Claire Cook's website for her Readers_for_Readers program:  Readers For Readers .  Maybe you can make a difference, too!