It’s Gaffney’s first hardcover-and a great book for the beach.
Strong characters making the best of an often schematic but always readable story. The dying Isabel, wise and loyal to the end, writes a letter to be read after her death that neatly counsels her friends on what to do with their lives-advice they immediately heed, thereby finding the requisite happiness such a tale demands. But each woman can depend on the others for support, so that when the crises come, they’re all there to pitch in with help, affection, and food. And Emma falls in love with a married man. Rudy’s struggle for autonomy is battered by Curtis’s cruel lies. Lee’s marriage is strained by her unsuccessful infertility treatments. Eventually, Isabel loses her battle with the cancer, but she finds a new love. Emma, a single journalist, wants to write fiction and marry. Rudy, whose family is a mess, is seeing a therapist and trying to make a life without angering her manipulative husband, Curtis. Lee, knowledgeable and professional, is married to Henry, a sweet hunk of a plumber, and wants a baby, but can’t get pregnant. As the story opens, she’s divorced, trying to make a new life, and recovering from breast cancer. Isabel, almost saintly in appearance and action, is the oldest, the group’s den mother, and the only one with a child.
They call themselves the “Saving Graces” because they once hit a dog while driving home after dinner, but managed to save it and named her Grace.
For more than ten years, Lee, Emma, Rudy, and Isabel have been getting together regularly for talk, dinner, and mutual support. A sweetly affirmative if teary-eyed story, Washington, D.C.’set, of four women who find consolation in friendship as they cope with cliché issues from breast cancer to infertility.
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