Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It- J.D. Mason

Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It
J.D. Mason
St. Martin’s, Mar 16 2010, $23.99
ISBN 9780312598563

In the late 1970s in high school, Renetta, Phyllis and Freddie became the best friends. Everyone knew them as the Tres Amigas. Then something happened to destroy their friendships as they left behind a newborn in the emergency room.

Over the next three decades, Renetta married a nasty person Vincent who used the secret as a weapon against her; until he suffered a questionable stroke. Phyllis put her career over love and family until she failed to get the promotion she expected which shattered her esteem. Freddie is married to Don, but feels the empty nest syndrome of three adult kids having flown away so she takes writing classes under Bianca Hightower who sees more than just a potentially good writer.

Tasha Darden grew up in foster care mostly with disgusting adults after being abandoned in an emergency room thirty years ago. When the only caring foster mom she ever had died, Tasha decides it is time to hire a detective to find her biological mother to ask why. Her sleuth has three prime candidates: the Tres Amigas.

This is a superb character study of friendship and redemption with the three BFFs and the one offspring all coming across fully developed yet different. Readers will appreciate Tasha’s efforts to meet the mother who abandoned her at birth, wondering who of the Tres Amigas is her mother. Well written, Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It is an engaging tale as the past has caught up with the present.

Harriet Klausner