One Good Friend Deserves Another

April 30, 2012
Prolific romance writer Higgins follows her 2010 chick lit debut, The Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship, with this engaging tale of three overachieving BFFs who try to rescue their fourth friend, Dhara, an Indian-American cardiologist, before she goes through with an arranged marriage. Yet Dhara’s risky leap of faith—and love—forces museum curator Wendy, geeky tech Kelly, and rigid lawyer Marta to question their own ideas of romance. “Life is never that simple,” the unlucky-in-love M.D. confesses after nixing a wedding with freewheeling hunk Cole to marry Desh, an Indian-American professor. The choice catapults each woman into an agonizing reassessment of the rules they’ve so carefully created to protect each other from broken hearts. Wendy re-evaluates life with perfect-in-every-way Parker to embrace her inner gypsy; Kelly accepts her past as a poor orphan; Dhara listens to both her heart and her head; and Marta trades a life plan for a life. All four discover the strength of their friendship, even if they don’t land the men of their dreams. Higgins scores with a richly told story of what every girl wants, and the friends who’d sacrifice everything to help her get it.

June 1, 2012
Former college roommates, now thirtysomethings, struggle with romantic foibles. Kelly, a tough redhead, is torn between a nice programmer at work and a man who is decidedly wrong for her. It doesn't help that the wrong guy is Wendy's brother, and Wendy is too distracted planning her country-club wedding to the perfect Parker to notice. Marta checks off the next step in her plan when she makes junior partner, but then she finds out her boyfriend is married. And Dhara is blowing all of their minds by agreeing to an arranged marriage. Through interventions over cosmopolitans and flashbacks to one fateful weekend at Vassar, each woman reaches her own happily complicated ending. Characters that could have been stock (the rich girl, the Trekkie programmer) have a depth that is strengthened by relationships with family, boyfriends, the past, and, most important, friends. Higgins' (The Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship, 2010) novel may beg comparison to Mary McCarthy's The Group but find a better reception by fans of Jennifer Weiner and Emily Giffin.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)