Book Review: Designer You by Sarahlyn Bruck

Designer You

by Sarahlyn Bruck

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Pam Wheeler checked every box: Happy marriage? Check. Fantastic kid? Check. Booming career? Check.

So when her husband dies suddenly and their DIY empire goes on life support, Pam must fix the relationship with her troubled and grief-stricken daughter and save the family business.

Pam and Nate were a couple who just couldn’t get away from each other, sharing not only their bed, but also a successful lifestyle empire as DIY home renovators, bloggers, podcasters, and co-authors.

When Nate dies in a freak accident, Pam becomes a 44-year-old widow, at once too young and too old—too young to be thrust into widowhood and too old to rejoin the dating pool.

Now the single mother of a headstrong and grief-stricken teenager, Pam’s life becomes a juggling act between dealing with her loss and learning how to parent by herself. On top of all that she also must reinvent herself or lose the empire that she and Nate had built so carefully.

It is time for Pam to seize the opportunity to step up as a mother, come out from behind Nate’s shadow, and rise as the sole face of the Designer You brand, and maybe, possibly, hopefully, find love again.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

She was sick with rage and fear that Nate had the audacity to be dead on today of all days. Insensitive jerk. Just the idea of getting up on stage by herself made her stomach cramp and she’d been in and out of the bathroom during the entire flight.

Pam thought her entire outfit didn’t cost half as much as the shoes the hostess was wearing. At once, she felt too young and unsophisticated, like the kid at the adult table at Thanksgiving who longs to be back at the kids' table with her younger cousins eating turkey in front of a Disney cartoon.

She wasn’t sure what hurt more, the casualness with which Grace could just fling insults at her or the fact that so often those insults were based in truth.

Nate himself would never fade, but those little details would start to get fuzzy in the same way any memory blurs over time. She clung to the impossible wish that she could hold onto everything about Nate, save it all onto a disk or a thumb drive, and whenever she wasn’t sure about the details of an experience she’d had with him, she could pull it up on her laptop and experience that trip, that meal, that birthday, all over again.

My Review:

I grew increasingly restless as I pushed through this book - it really wasn’t to my taste. I should have stopped reading and pushed this one in the DNF pile. The premise had promise and while there were a few glimmers of entertaining observations, I found the overall execution to be mundane and morose. I kept waiting for the story to improve and sadly, it just never did. While it wasn’t bad, it was just middle of the road, real-life humdrum type of okay. The characters were exasperating and annoying and weren’t people I could care for or about, nor were they endearing to me, as the mourning widow seemed to have bailed on everything except finishing her deceased husband’s projects. Her priorities were askew and in particular, she wasn’t parenting and selfishly leaving her grieving teenaged daughter fending for herself and growing increasingly resentful, defiant and obnoxious, and making extremely poor choices. Like many neglectful parents, instead of seeking help or providing consequences, she threw money at it and little else until it was too late. By the time the mother finally gained some insights and their relationship had started to turn around, the story stopped. And I truly mean it just stopped, without an ending, which is something I find particularly irksome. But maybe it is just me, as this story seems to have tripped several landmines in the field of my pet peeves.

Empress DJ

About Sarahlyn Bruck

Sarahlyn Bruck writes contemporary women’s fiction and lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter. She is the author of Designer You, published by Crooked Cat Books on August 31, 2018. Sarahlyn teaches writing and literature at a local community college and also coaches writers for Author Accelerator.

Designer You is Sarahlyn’s debut, and she is hard at work on her next book. Want the latest updates? Follow along for news, events, and announcements at sarahlynbruck.com. You can sign up for her monthly newsletter there, too.

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