Blueprints By Barbara Delinsky

[amazon_link id=”0349405042″ target=”_blank” ]
[/amazon_link]’Blueprints’is the latest book by Barbara Delinsky.

Jamie MacAfee’s life is almost perfect. She’s sure she loves her fiancée, even if she hasn’t quite worked out why she won’t set a wedding date and she certainly adores her job, working as an architect on their family home renovation show. Meanwhile, her beloved mother Caroline has built up her confidence after a painful divorce, working closely alongside her daughter as the very successful host of Gut It!. Everything is going to plan, until the lives of both women are changed overnight. When the TV channel plan to replace Caroline with Jamie as the show’s host, Caroline is left feeling horribly betrayed – and old in the eyes of the world. Then tragedy strikes, leaving Jamie guardian to her small, orphaned step-brother and fiancée to a man who doesn’t want the child.

Who am I? Both women ask, as the blueprints they’ve built their lives around break down. While loyalties shift, decisions hover, and new relationships tempt, it’s time to find out what they really want – and where their future lies…

‘Blueprints’ is the first book that I’ve read by Barbara and I genuinely enjoyed this story about relationships, new beginnings and sudden endings.

The story is seen through the eyes of mother and daughter Caroline and jamie, who both thought that their relationship was invincible as the pair of them hosted the successful home DIY show, ‘Gut It’ until one day, it’s decided that Caroline at the age of 56 is too old to present the show and her 29 year old daughter is to be her replacement, Heartbroken at being cast aside for growing old, the sudden change in the relationship creates an unwanted rift between the pair of them. But that’s not the only thing that changes in the pairs relationship as Jamie’s father and Caroline’s ex husband is tragically killed in a car accident and Jamie becomes the legal guardian of her step brother, Tad.

The story flows between the two women and give an interesting and insightful viewpoint of the women as they both reach pinnacle moments of their lives, Jamie becoming a mother and realising that the life, that she had paved out, wasn’t to be whilst Caroline deals with being regarded as old even though, she feels like a young woman and lives a vibrant life but with the help of a good friend, she soon discovers her lust for life and begins to see herself in a new light.

Written in a fluid fashion that flows along at a lovely pace, this book made for entertaining and poignant reading. Packed with strong, likeable and relatable characters, the story concentrates on many issues, such as ageism, mother/daughter relationships and is filled with many twists that occasionally made for shocking and heartbreaking moments.

Barbara Delinsky is a new author for me, but definitely an author that I would like to explore in the future, as ‘Blueprints’ is the perfect introduction to the American writer

You can pre-order [amazon_link id=”0349405042″ target=”_blank” ]Blueprints from Amazon [/amazon_link] and will be available to buy from good bookshops from 25th February 2016.