Happily Ever After-Elizabeth Maxwell

Happily Ever After Elizabeth Maxwell Touchstone, Mar 18 2014, $15.00 ISBN: 9781476732664 Forty-six year old single mom Sadie Fuller raises her tweener daughter Allison with help from Greta the housekeeper, Sadie remains friends with her ex who came out of the closet, and writes steamy romances under the pseudonym KT Briggs. Feeling lonely, Sadie advertises for a no-strings affair. Jason the kind lawyer responds as his sexual self-esteem was nuked by his wife’s cheating. Sadie’s latest "Happily Ever After" stars protagonists Lily Dell and Aidan Hathaway, but pages the author never wrote to include a new character Clarissa the witch show up overnight in the draft. Even more stunning to a bewildered Sadie is when she meets confused Aidan at the store. Whereas Allison adores Aidan; Jason is upset by the appearance of his gorgeous hunk rival; while Sadie struggles to understand how he escaped from her novel though praying it is not dementia. This is a delightful brilliant metafiction with a novel inside a novel that lampoons the romance genre. The HEA male lead steals the show with his acting like the hunk of a heated romance tale but in a real life situation he comes across as either eccentric or looney. With a clever nod to Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next saga, Happily Ever After is an entertaining amusing satire. Harriet Klausner