Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella

Rebecca Bloomwood just hit rock bottom. But she's never looked better....
Becky Bloomwood has a fabulous flat in London's trendiest neighborhood, a troupe of glamorous socialite friends, and a closet brimming with the season's must-haves. The only trouble is that she can't actually afford it—not any of it. 
Her job writing at Successful Savings not only bores her to tears, it doesn't pay much at all. And lately Becky's been chased by dismal letters from Visa and the Endwich Bank—letters with large red sums she can't bear to read—and they're getting ever harder to ignore. 

She tries cutting back; she even tries making more money. But none of her efforts succeeds. Becky's only consolation is to buy herself something ... just a little something....

Finally a story arises that Becky actually cares about, and her front-page article catalyzes a chain of events that will transform her life—and the lives of those around her—forever. 

Sophie Kinsella has brilliantly tapped into our collective consumer conscience to deliver a novel of our times—and a heroine who grows stronger every time she weakens. Becky Bloomwood's hilarious schemes to pay back her debts are as endearing as they are desperate. Her "confessions" are the perfect pick-me-up when life is hanging in the (bank) balance. ~authors website

Movie Trailer

The Saving Graces by Patricia Gaffney

Meet the Saving Graces, four of the best friends a woman can ever have. For ten years, Emma, Rudy, Lee and Isabel have shared a deep affection that has helped them deal with the ebb and flow of expactations and disappointments common to us all. Calling themselves the Saving Graces, the quartet is united by understanding, honestly, and acceptance—a connection that has grown stronger as the years go by...

Though these sisters of the heart and soul have seen it all, talked through it all, Emma, Rudy, Lee and Isabel will not be prepared for a crisis of astouding proporations that will put their love and courage to the ultimate test. ~authors website

Characters

Emma, a sharp-tongued. soft-hearted skeptic, doesn't believe in love - until she meets the one man she can't have.

Lee, whom they all are sure is "the normal one," longs for a baby.

Isabel, the oldest, is a survivor whose wisdom and strength were forged by the worst trials life can offer. Divorced and free, she's falling for her single, attractive neighbor--a man she's sure must be gay.

Rudy a beauty with an extraordinary gift for love and a shaky, dysfunctional past, is desperately trying to hold on to her deeply troubled marriage.

~book summary

1,000 White Women by Jim Fergus

First Book Club Book!

This is the reason why we picked 1,000 White Women to start our book club in 2001... Don’t you love it when you happen to pick up a book that lives with you for a few days, and almost like a fascinating stranger, invites you into a whole new world? I just finished reading one of those books that I loved so much I slowed down my pace toward the end wishing I would never have to turn the final page.  Please . . . take a look at Jim Fergus‘ novel, 1000 White Women. ~talk with the preacher

One Thousand White Women begins with May Dodd's journey west into the unknown. A government program, in which women are brought west as brides for the Cheyenne, is her vehicle. What follows is the story of May's adventures: her marriage to Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, and her conflict of being caught between two worlds, loving two men, living two lives. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time. ~authors website

Email response from Jim Fergus

In answer to your questions, I was researching what I thought would be a nonfiction book about the Norther Cheyenne when I cam across a reference to the fact that the Cheyennes went to a peace conference at Fort Laramie in 1854 and requested of the government authorities the gift of 1,000 white women as brides.  The Cheyennes saw this as a perfect means of assimilating themselves into the white world.  I thought it was a great jumping off point for a novel.  All the rest of the story is fiction.

Most of my research materials are listed in the bibliography at the end of the book.  I also traveled extensively in the great plains, spent time on the northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana, and read a number of journals written by women on the frontier in those years.  

As to why I haven't written other novels, I guess I'm kind of a late bloomer and have been busy making my living as a freelance journalist for the past twenty years.  I'm currently writing the screenplay to kww for a producer in Hollywood and working on another novel.  This one is set in the 1930's in northern Mexico and southern Arizona and involves a band of wild Apaches who still lobed free in the Sierra Madre mountains.  It's also based on a true story, though heavily fictionalized.

I'm not sure that any man can really write convincingly from the point of view of a woman.  But I did try.  I've always liked women, in many ways prefer their company to that of men, and I pay attention to them, which it strikes me is something that many w\men don't do.  And I have a number of close women friends who I bounced some of this stuff off.  Finally, the job of a novelist is to attempt to enter the skin of your characters and you can't let a little thing like gender get in the way.

Best regards,

Jim