By Claire Bocardo
Though she has a perfectly good real name, Sarah Jane MacAuley has been called “Sissy” since she was five years old. Mama died when she was in high school, Sissy stayed home to raise the younger kids, and Daddy ran off every boy who ever paid any attention to her. Now all the good men in her tiny Texas town have married or left, and Daddy’s getting harder to live with every day of the hot summer of 1975. When her best friend asks, “When does it get to be your turn,” Sissy is shocked: it has never occurred to her that she had one coming.
The bank offers her old job back, and her close friends advise her to take it. Then rodeo cowboy Michael Wayne Lee comes to town and starts courting her. At the bank and to Michael Wayne, she’s Sarah, and she likes it. Daddy’s having a falling-down fit, but “Sissy” doesn’t fit any more. Still, if she’s not Sissy, who is she? She can only find out by Becoming Sarah.
What They Are Saying About Sweet Nothings
The portrayal of this woman's marital somnambulism is so flawless that you want to scream at her, but the author skillfully uses it to present the character's full awakening. She's a heroine with a sense of humor who is realistic about the failings of her own psychology. I loved the accounts of the late-bloomer dating experience and found the new romance thoroughly winsome. 3 1/2 stars
—Gail Benninger
Romantic Times
Friends and Lovers
Friends and Lovers, which will remind readers of the classic movie The Duchess of Idaho, is about two very different kinds of relationships and how both types help to make a person's life complete. ...Claire Bocardo deftly handles the dual relationship and the lifestyle of a fiftyish woman with class and clarity. 4 stars
—Harriet Klausner
Affaire de Coeur,
Ivy Grimes. Flo Huckabee. Two friends who've been together and apart for ages. With names like these, you might conjure up small town America and you would be right. Flo's lived there all her life; Ivy's escaped a few times but has again ended up back in Cedar Grove, Texas, this time after a disastrous ten year marriage that has Ivy reeling with heartache. The only place to go was home, to cry on her widowed friend's shoulder.
—Anne Carter
Beacon Street Press