Book Review
of C U @ 8 Sponsored by Virtual Book Tours
Publisher: Createspace
Release Date: March 2012
Book Genre: Chick Lit/Women’s Contemporary
Book Genre: Chick Lit/Women’s Contemporary
Blurb
:
Do your kids ever really leave?
Fenella Fisher and Suki Rabinowitz are middle-aged single mothers whose children have left home and started on their own lives and careers. But Suki’s son Josh is a cocaine-addict who supposedly fathered a baby on a visit to the UK; and Fenella’s daughter Kirsty has just been dumped and is feeling miserable. Fenella and Suki decide they need to step in to help their children and hatch a plan to sort out Josh’s mess and find Kirsty a suitable man, with some hilarious consequences. After interviewing prospective husbands for Kirsty at Waves Restaurant and Bar, they discover that a good man is hard to find.
Excerpt:
Chapter 10
‘Fun-loving, creative
free-spirited young woman looking for a life partner.
Travel, art and adventure are my middle names. Conservative is out and not in my
repertoire. Control freak does not
feature in my life dictionary. Cheap and
miserly are not welcome in my universe.
If you are intelligent with a sense of humour, a stable job and a six
pack, then please contact me so I can get to know you.’
Suki had said short and
sweet was better. Men on dating sites
couldn’t be bothered to read long diatribes; they were in too much of a hurry
to meet their ideal woman. So Fenella
had complied. With quite a bit of eye
rolling and laughter, the two had bandied about words until they were
satisfied. “Leave it to stew for 24
hours before we check for any bites,” Suki had suggested and Fenella had done
just that. Twenty-four hours had passed. Throughout the day Fenella had kept looking
at the clock on the kitchen wall. Since
the invention of cell phones she had stopped wearing her watch. In fact, she had no idea where it was or
where she’d last seen it. It had been a
gift, she couldn’t even remember who’d given it to her. It had been about a decade ago for a
birthday, she thought. Suki was
late. Before she left the day before
she’d made Fenella promise not to open up Kirsty’s profile page and look at the
replies. She wanted to be a part of the
action, which Fenella supposed was only fair seeing that this whole internet
dating thing had been her idea. Where
the hell was Suki? Fenella was just
about to succumb to temptation and open up the webpage when the doorbell rang.
“976 replies! I told you!”
Suki had an excited sparkle in her eyes.
She looked quite animated, Fenella thought, feeling less excited
herself. Well, maybe she was a little
excited, but quite a bit apprehensive as well about the whole damn thing. “So what we need to do first is delete the
weirdoes and creeps.”
“I thought you said there
weren’t weirdoes, creeps and psychopaths on this website!” exclaimed Fenella
feeling rather naïve about that kind of stuff.
“Um, not really, well some
but sort of. They are far less weirdish
and freakish on this site than on some of the other sites,” said Suki clicking
on links and deleting emails at quite a pace.
“Yuck! Yugh! Ugggg!”
Fenella peeped over Suki’s
shoulder only to see a picture of an erect penis filling her screen. “And you were saying?”
“Some creepos still slip
through, like that one. So what we do is
reduce these responses to our top few hundred.”
“Few hundred? Few hundred!”
Fenella was in shock. There was
no way she was interviewing a few hundred young men. “I’m not sure about this Suki. I’m not sure if it’s worth it. These interviews…I don’t think I can do it.” Falling back onto her chair Fenella began to
fan herself. A panic attack seemed to be
developing as the heat started from her head and seemed to spread down to her
toes. It was either that or a hot flush
and the start of menopause.
Suki sat upright on the
dining table chair glaring at Fenella with her hands on her hips. “Do you or do you not want Kirsty to give you
grandchildren and make you a granny?
For someone who wasn’t that
tall Suki could be quite intimidating.
“I…er…do want Kirsty to have children one day. But Suki, there has to be another way. I can’t sit through a date with a few hundred
men and interview them. My school
holiday doesn’t last forever and I don’t want to use it all up on…this!” Fenella pointed at the computer screen. If she didn’t go and fetch herself some ice
water from the fridge she was going to self-combust.
Suki folded her arms and
scowled. “You may be right. Logistically and time-wise to set up a few
hundred dates is improbable. You
wouldn’t be giving each applicant the attention they deserve. And if we do a rush job then we won’t get the
best. Let me think a minute. We probably need more coffee,” said Suki
draining the dregs from her mug. Fenella
had hardly touched hers. Coffee was the
last thing on her mind. The last thing
she felt like doing was pouring more heat into her already overheating body!
“You want that special blend
again?”
“Yeah, that East African one
again. I love the taste, the aroma. Can’t believe you never brought me back a
bag!” The truth was that Fenella had
spent ages dithering about what to buy Suki.
It was so hard to buy a gift for a woman who had everything and was
fussy to boot. She often criticised
Fenella’s style choices, although to be honest, baggy t-shirts and track pants
were probably on the unflattering side.
After wandering around browsing for what seemed like hours, she’d settled
for an ornately carved wooden box similar to the Swahili carved wooden doorways
she’d fallen in love with. It was always
risky buying Suki jewellery as she tended to only wear pieces completely out of
Fenella’s price range. So a box it had
been but in retrospect coffee would have been better. Fenella hadn’t even thought about coffee as a
gift.
With the coffee brewing and
the machine making its happy sounds, Fenella joined Suki in front of her laptop
at the dining room table. “Any bright
ideas yet? Or should we just delete this
profile?”
Glaring at Fenella Suki
leaned forward to hug the keyboard protectively. “No don’t touch! No deleting, I have an idea as surprising as
it may sound.”
Fenella gave an eye
roll. “Seriously Suki, covering up my
keyboard like that. How old are you?”
“Never trust a woman who
tells you her age,” Suki countered. “I
know what we are going to do. It’s
perfect. In fact so perfect, I think I
should patent the idea.”
Fenella groaned. This wasn’t sounding good. It was building up to one of Suki’s
hare-brained schemes she could tell.
“Okay, stop keeping me hanging in suspense. What’s the idea?”
Suki gave a little shake of
her shoulders and sat up straight. “We,”
she paused dramatically for effect, “Are going to set up a mass date.”
Groaning out loud Fenella
held her head in her hands. “Don’t tell
me you are suggesting what I think you are suggesting.”
“We email our top few
hundred, say something witty, hook them further. A little saucy repartee. Not all will reply, but many will and then we
suggest a meeting. We give all our short
list the same date and time to be at a venue we pick.”
“A few hundred doesn’t sound
like a short list to me!”
“Oh stop being negative,”
Suki pouted. “Then we casually wander
among them and check them out. We can
take a notebook and make notes. We might
even strike up some idle chit-chat with some of them.”
“Are we going to introduce
ourselves and tell them why they’re there?
Some of them might be pissed to find they’re part of a mass date. I’m not sure about this.” Fenella chewed on her lip. Suki’s plan sounded very flawed to her ears.
“No silly of course
not! We’re not asking for trouble. We check them out like we just coincidentally
happened to be there at the same time.
They’ll think their date stood them up.
We can make up some excuse when we email the ones we liked later. Do you think we might need a checklist for
our prospects?”
Suki was on a roll and
Fenella knew she would not be deterred.
This plan would go ahead even though Fenella had grave reservations
about it. “So where will we meet them?”
Suki threw her arms around
Fenella, giving her a suffocating hug.
“I knew you’d come on board! I
was thinking that new restaurant/bar on the beachfront we’ve been going to. Waves.
It’s quite big inside and should accommodate all our prospectives. We should get the owner to give us commission
as we’ll be increasing his business on a normally quiet week night. Don’t look at me like that I’m just
joking. About the commission part, that
is.”
Fenella gave a thin
smile. She felt quite drained. This reminded her of why she hated dating and
was content to remain single. It was just
too much hard work and unnecessary stress.
No wonder people elected to stay in bad relationships. “Let me pour that coffee. You sure this will work?” Suki nodded, grinning and humming to herself
as she turned back to scroll through the responses to the ad on the dating
site. In a way Fenella was glad that
finding Kirsty a man had made Suki’s other problem with that woman in Cornwall,
take a back seat. She felt bad keeping
Kirsty’s news about Josh a secret from her friend. But then again, she was sure that Suki had
kept secrets from her about Kirsty she’d heard over the years. Lying by omission. It was something everybody did to protect
those they cared about.
About the
Author:
A teacher, writer, mother - Cindy Vine was
born in Cape Town, South Africa and has lived and worked in many different
countries around the world. She currently resides in Tanzania at the foot of
Mount Kilimanjaro. Cindy has three children, two of whom have already left
home. Writing and reading has been a passion of hers since she was a young
girl.
Contacts:
Websites: http://cindyvine.com ; http://cindy-vine.blogspot.com ; http://facebook.com/cindyvinefanpage ; http://twitter.com/cindyvine ; http://cindyvine.hubpages.com
Purchase Links:
Book Review:
Just
because your kids have moved at doesn’t mean you stop being a mom. I’m sure I will be the same with my
kids. I come by it naturally since my
mom is still this way. Now mind you, I’ve
been married for over 20 years, have two children of my own, and my mother
still worries about me, lectures me on not going out by myself at night, how I’m
eating, and other motherisms.
In this book, Fenella is the mom…
only her kids justify the continued mothering.
One, Kirsty, is involved with a creep who ended up dumping her after
years together. Suki son is a drug
addict with issues of his own. Together
they resolve to find a new, better man for Kirsty and join a dating site to
find men. Only some people think Fenella
is a cougar since she meets a new boy toy every night. Read the book to find out the hilarious
consequences.
I give this book 4 out of 5 clouds.
This
product or book may have been distributed for review; this in no way affects my
opinions or reviews.
