I started my book review blog in 2009 and I have read so many outstanding books that I wanted to share them again with my followers on #SegueSaturday.  I first posted this review in July 2011. The book should resonate with mothers and daughters.  Enjoy!

ABOUT THE BOOK

Two sisters whose lives seemed forever intertwined are torn apart when a magical little black dress gives each one a glimpse of an unavoidable future.

Antonia Ashton has worked hard to build a thriving career and a committed relationship, but she realizes her life has gone off-track. Forced to return home to Blue Hills when her mother, Evie, suffers a massive stroke, Toni finds the old Victorian where she grew up as crammed full of secrets as it is with clutter. Now she must put her mother’s house in order—and uncover long-buried truths about Evie and her aunt, Anna, who vanished fifty years earlier on the eve of her wedding. By shedding light on the past, Toni illuminates her own mistakes and learns the most unexpected things about love, magic, and a little black dress with the power to break hearts…and mend them.

MY REVIEW

Nothing is as magical as a little black dress!

Relationships between mothers and daughters can sometimes be intense, but when you put a magical little black dress into the mix, it’s extremely life changing.

The story carries you through the tempestuous relationship between Evie (mother) and Antonia (daughter) and the little black dress that brings them together.

I literally could not put this book down. I read it in one sitting. Every other chapter is written in either Evie’s voice or Antonia’s voice and the author does a fine job in the transition.

A great summer read!

Thank you to BookBrowse’s First Impression for giving me the opportunity to review this book.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan McBride is the USA Today Bestselling author of Blue Blood and the Lefty Award-winning, Anthony Award-nominated Debutante Dropout Mysteries from HarperCollins/Avon, including The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club, Night Of The Living Deb, Too Pretty To Die, and Say Yes to the Death. Susan has a second bestselling series with HC/Avon that debuted in May 2014, the River Road Mysteries, that include To Helen Back, Mad as Helen, Not a Chance in Helen and Come Helen High Water. A darker mystery featuring Texas police detective Jo Larsen, Walk Into Silence, was released in December 2016 by Thomas & Mercer and hit #1 in the US and UK (and #3 in Australia) for paid Kindle. The second Jo Larsen book, Walk a Crooked Line, was released in July 2018.

Susan’s young adult thriller, Very Bad Things, came out in 2014 from Delacorte Press. Publishers Weekly raved: “McBride’s fast-paced plot is fueled by jumps between multiple characters’ perspectives, and her rendering of the venerable yet sinister school…is as absorbing as the tightly wound mystery.” She has authored several YA non-mystery novels for Delacorte about debutantes in Houston: The Debs (2008) and Love, Lies, And Texas Dips (2009). Gloves Off, the third book, is currently in publishing limbo.

Susan has also penned three women’s fiction titles: The Truth About Love & Lightning, featured in Target’s Emerging Authors program, a Midwest Connections Pick, and dubbed “a poignant page-turner” by Publishers Weekly; Little Black Dress, a book club favorite and Target Recommended Read that spent five weeks on the St. Louis bestsellers list; and The Cougar Club, a Target “Bookmarked Breakout Title” and a Midwest Connections Pick. Foreign editions of Susan’s books have been published in France, Turkey, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania.

Susan has a short memoir available from HarperCollins: In the Pink: How I Met the Perfect (Younger) Man, Survived Breast Cancer, and Found True Happiness After 40, which tells her tale of becoming an “accidental Cougar” and marrying a younger man, her cancer diagnosis at age 42, and finding herself pregnant at 47. In 2012, Susan was named one of St. Louis’s “Most Dynamic People of the Year” by the Ladue News and was given the “Survivor of the Year” Award by the St. Louis affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. As Susan likes to say, “Life is never boring.”

Follow Susan on her website, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Amazon and Bookbub.