Author: Gigi Levangie Grazer
Publisher: Ballantine Books (July 10, 2012)
Format: Hardcover; Pgs 320
Genre: Fiction
Source: Library
As soon as I finished this book, I started missing the characters. I had not realized that I had invested so much into their lives, laughter and disappointments.
There is very little in their world that I would call real, there is nothing practical or logical within this group of friends, but what they do have is each other. For better or for worse, they are there to bring Hannah Bernal and her daughter Ellie through the worst time of their lives.
No one could be more in love with their husband than Hannah, but on a fateful day, she receives the call than any wife in love would dread. Her writer/ chef husband John has been killed by a hit and run driver.
Death is not a subject to laugh at, but Hannah’s “Grief Team” is made up of a self-enamored group that she has gathered along the way. Animal lover Chloe that is so unaware that she brings a wild animal into her home thinking that it is a dog needing to be rescued; Aimee who has been an “aspiring” actress for decades and Jay, her TV producing partner, who is perpetually searching for his Mr. Right. Not people that you would usually run to in a time of need, but when that is all that you have, you learn to make do.
As Ellie gets kicked out of her pretentious preschool for talking to and about her dead father and Hannah’s life spinning out of control with the threat of losing her beloved home “Casa Sugar”, she finds herself standing in her backyard under an avocado tree – when out of nowhere a voice answers her question of “why me”?
This is where the book takes the woo-woo turn, apparently, the previous owner, now deceased, of Casa Sugar – Trish, has dropped by to help Hannah through her grief and seems to have brought other spirits with her. Somehow, in Hannah’s grief she has developed a bright light of some sort that draws the “present in spirit though absent in body” world to her.
You have to learn how to laugh at the darker sides of life and though inappropriate at times, this book had me laughing at what people with more money than common sense find important.
Part of me wishes that this book could be turned into a several book series because of the disjointed look that the grief team has of viewing the world around them, but then again, a good thing can be overdone and maybe it is best to leave the people of Santa Monica’s NoMo district alone.
There is very little in their world that I would call real, there is nothing practical or logical within this group of friends, but what they do have is each other. For better or for worse, they are there to bring Hannah Bernal and her daughter Ellie through the worst time of their lives.
No one could be more in love with their husband than Hannah, but on a fateful day, she receives the call than any wife in love would dread. Her writer/ chef husband John has been killed by a hit and run driver.
Death is not a subject to laugh at, but Hannah’s “Grief Team” is made up of a self-enamored group that she has gathered along the way. Animal lover Chloe that is so unaware that she brings a wild animal into her home thinking that it is a dog needing to be rescued; Aimee who has been an “aspiring” actress for decades and Jay, her TV producing partner, who is perpetually searching for his Mr. Right. Not people that you would usually run to in a time of need, but when that is all that you have, you learn to make do.
As Ellie gets kicked out of her pretentious preschool for talking to and about her dead father and Hannah’s life spinning out of control with the threat of losing her beloved home “Casa Sugar”, she finds herself standing in her backyard under an avocado tree – when out of nowhere a voice answers her question of “why me”?
This is where the book takes the woo-woo turn, apparently, the previous owner, now deceased, of Casa Sugar – Trish, has dropped by to help Hannah through her grief and seems to have brought other spirits with her. Somehow, in Hannah’s grief she has developed a bright light of some sort that draws the “present in spirit though absent in body” world to her.
You have to learn how to laugh at the darker sides of life and though inappropriate at times, this book had me laughing at what people with more money than common sense find important.
Part of me wishes that this book could be turned into a several book series because of the disjointed look that the grief team has of viewing the world around them, but then again, a good thing can be overdone and maybe it is best to leave the people of Santa Monica’s NoMo district alone.
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