Summer Blowout

March 24, 2008
Cook updates the themes of love and disenchantment that drove Life’s a Beach
and Must Love Dogs
in her latest beacher. Bella Shaughnessy, a makeup artist whose solace in times of hardship is finding just the right lipstick to match her mood, gets a divorce and quits men after discovering that her husband of 10 years has been seeing her younger half-sister, Sophia. During a wedding job, she gets stuck with dog-sitting Precious (who “looked kind of like a flying squirrel”) and quickly gets so attached that she takes drastic measures to keep the dog. Can other kinds of attachment be far behind, as cute and easygoing Sean Ryan enters the picture? Sufficient comedy and romance keep readers entertained until the last page.

Starred review from June 15, 2008
Lipstick rules in this sunny romance tucked inside a Boston family's chain of beauty salons. Recently divorced makeup artist Bella Shaughnessy is going down swinging as she reacts to newcomer Sean Ryan and the gnawing possibility that developers are sabotaging her family's original shop. Cook's ("Life's a Beach") ability to make families' foibles ring trueand funnyensures a delightful read. Snap this one up and enjoy the makeup advice.

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2008
Bella Shaughnessy and her large extended family, including ex-wives and half-siblings, all work in her fathers chain of Boston salons as hairdressers and makeup artists. While business is up, the same cannot be said for Bella, since her half-sister Sophia is now dating her ex-husband Craig. Sophia also gets all the good clients, prepping senators for TV while Bella is stuck with ungrateful brides who leave their dogs and wild kids with her to babysit. She meets an entrepreneur named Sean Ryan at a career fair who gets under her skin as he simultaneously gives her an idea for a business venture to separate her from her crowded family of stylists. Bella struggles to find her place within her family and ease herself into the idea of a new relationship while always finding the right shade of lipstick for her mood. A brisk story, Summer Blowout is primed, like Cook's previous novel Must Love Dogs (2002), to become a big-screen romantic comedy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)