Proper Care and Maintenance of a Friendship

This is the next book I am diving into! A review from BookFinds will follow shortly. Below is a description of the book and the recent Publishers Weekly review. Enjoy!

The Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship by Lisa Verge Higgins

Summary:

Rachel Braun was the inspiration to her group of friends, the one who lived each day to the fullest – and the one whose life was cut tragically short. Upon her untimely death, Rachel left letters for her three best friends challenging them to face their biggest fears.

Sarah, an international relief worker, must travel half way around the world to track down the only man she ever loved. Stay-at-home mom Kate must confront her fear of heights by skydiving and soon finds that her new hobby is affecting her once-tranquil marriage. And Jo, a media mogul voted “least likely to breed,” is given the most terrifying assignment of all: caring for Rachel’s orphaned and grieving little girl.

Even as these women mourn Rachel’s passing, her legacy lives on and their lives are enriched by a friend who, in many ways, knew them better than they knew themselves.

Lisa Verge Higgins

January 2011, Grand Central/ 5 Spot, $13.99 trade paper

Publishers Weekly Review:

The Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship
Lisa Verge Higgins, Grand Central/5 Spot, $13.99 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-0-446-56351-2
Higgins’s (Heaven in His Arms) life-affirming novel reduces a fearless foursome to three when the adventurous Rachel Braun dies of cancer at 38. Though Rachel kept her diagnosis a secret from her friends, she wrote each a challenge to be read after her death. Kate Jansen, a married homemaker with three children, is told to skydive (“you’re overwhelmed by your life,” Rachel writes). In Rachel’s view, globe-trotting Doctors Without Borders nurse Sarah Pollard is blinded to love in her grief over her ex: “You need to win him back, or finally say good-bye.” But it’s Bobbie “Jo” Marcum, a single, commitment-phobic businesswoman, of whom Rachel makes the greatest request, by leaving her custody of her seven-year-old daughter: “Take Grace.” Large and small, their decisions affect them all in transformative ways, as when Kate accompanies Sarah to find her ex, now a doctor living in India. Higgins’s romantic tendencies (she’s penned several romance novels) inform the proceedings; with her mainstream debut, she creates a happy reminder that life is all about taking risks. (Jan.)

“Higgins writes with grace and humor, reminding us to hold tight to the ones we love.”
—Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author of The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners