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New Beginnings by Jill Barnett

Fabulous Romance From the Best Selling Author of Days of Summer

Dec 27, 2008 Elaine Walker

Best selling author, Jill Barnett is known for her stories of family relationships, love, loss and hope. New Beginnings is no exception and makes ideal holiday reading.

Jill Barnett’s New Beginnings is set in California, with almost all of the action taking place on the spectacular snowy slopes of the Lake Tahoe mountains in winter. This is where the family gathers, hearts break, and love blossoms.

Mike and March Cantrell

For those who love the nostalgia of the late 60s in San Francisco , it’s all here in the opening chapter. Readers meet the young heroine, March, newly graduated and living in the Haight in an old Victorian. She meets her Prince Charming (Mike Cantrell) at the Fillmore. March is “a barefoot girl, dancing alone, dressed in velvet, with ribbons in her hair.”

Spanning 3 decades, New Beginnings has sex-and-the-city type girlfriends including the twice divorced Ellie with her limousine and devoted driver. The ladies lunch on Mexican seafood “baked sour cream and spinach enchiladas with lobster and red pepper sauce “ eaten in the Sunset District. Jill Barnett occasionally lapses into Californian home-decorating schemes, “Ours (dining room) was thirty five feet long and had a five tiered chandelier that had come to San Francisco around Cape Horn” . Great touches which contribute to the atmosphere of the book.

Snowboarding at Lake Tahoe

The story unfolds around the young couple passionately in love, sharing their joy of snowboarding on the Lake Tahoe mountains, and starting a family. Jill Barnett fans will not be disappointed with her sensitively wrought hallmark descriptions of the complex highs and lows of the married life and careers of the highly likeable Mike and March Cantrell. As the reader might expect, the Cantrell family business is a great success and they go from strength to strength until unexpected tragedy strikes.

Coping with Loss and Grief

Jill Barnett writes convincingly about the heartbreak of loss and grief. New Beginnings has all the elements of a successful romance alongside a poignant portrait of a woman who is struggling to find her way. The emotional tension, stress and turmoil associated with loss are described with care and finesse. Naturally, other events are happening at the same time, and March finds herself facing the dilemmas of a relationship with a younger man whilst attempting to guide her adult children with their own relationships.

As with Jill Barnett’s other novels, the drama and excitement run high too. There are more than 7 million copies of her books in print and they appear around the world in 17 different languages.

Author : Barnett, Jill

New Beginnings is published by HarperCollins

2008

ISBN 978-1-84756-025-4

The copyright of the article New Beginnings by Jill Barnett in American Fiction is owned by Elaine Walker. Permission to republish New Beginnings by Jill Barnett in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.