BLURB:
Take
a trip to the charming little town of Heart Lake, and meet three best friends
you’ll never forget. . . .
Rachel,
Jessica, and Tiffany have major money problems. Tiffany’s whipped out the plastic
one too many times, and now a mountain of debt has come crashing down on her.
Jessica’s husband has lost his job, thrusting this longtime stay-at-home mom
out into the cold, cruel workforce. And Rachel’s divorce transformed her from
an upper-middle-class mom to a strapped-for-cash divorcée. So the three women
start a financial support group called the Small Change Club—vowing to bring
balance back to their checkbooks…and, in turn, their lives. Along the way they
learn some valuable lessons—that friendship is an investment that keeps on
growing and that sometimes love, like a loose coin, can be found in the most
unexpected places…
“Roberts’s
trademark humor and memorable characters wrestling with real-life issues add up
to a novel that will make readers smile and wish for more.”—BookPage
Excerpt One:
There it sat, a Cloud Nine queen-sized luxury gold comforter
with red ribbon appliqué and metallic embroidery. Forty-percent off. It was the
last one left. Tiffany Turner had seen it, and so had the other woman.
The woman caught Tiffany looking at it and her eyes
narrowed. Tiffany narrowed hers right back. Her competitor was somewhere in her
fifties, dressed for comfort in jeans and a sweater, her feet shod in tennis
shoes for quick movement – obviously a sale veteran, but Tiffany wasn’t
intimidated. She was younger. She had the drive, the determination.
It only took that one second to start the race. The other
woman strode toward the comforter with the confidence that comes with age, her
hand stretched toward the prize.
Tiffany chose that moment to look over her competitor’s
shoulder. Her eyes went wide and she gasped. “Oh, my gosh.” Her hands flew to
her face in horror.
The other woman turned to see the calamity happening in back
of her.
And that was her undoing. In a superhuman leap, Tiffany
bagged the comforter just as her competitor turned back. Score.
Boy, if looks could kill.
It would be rude to gloat.
Tiffany gave an apologetic shrug and murmured, “Sorry.”
The woman paid her homage with a reluctant nod. “You’re
good.”
Yes, I am. “Thanks,” Tiffany murmured, and left the field of
battle for the customer service counter.
As she walked away, she heard the other woman mutter,
“Little beast.”
Okay, now she’d gloat.
She was still gloating as she drove home from the mall an
hour later. She’d not only scored on the comforter, she’d gotten two sets of
towels (buy one, get one free), a great top for work, a cute little jacket, a
new shirt for Brian, and a pair of patent metallic purple shoes with 3 ½ inch
heels that were so hot she’d burn the pavement when she walked. With the new
dress she’d snagged at thirty percent off (plus another ten percent off for
using her department store card), she’d be a walking inferno. Brian would melt
when he saw her.
Her husband would also melt if he saw how much she’d spent
today, so she had to beat him home. And since he would be back from the office
in half an hour, she was now in another race, one that she didn’t dare lose.
That was the downside of hitting the mall after work. She always had to hurry
home to hide her treasures before Brian walked in the door. But she could do it.
Tiffany followed the Abracadabra shopping method: get the
bargain and then make it disappear for a while so you could later insist that
said bargain had been sitting around the house for ages. She’d learned that one
from her mother. Two years before, she had successfully used the Guessing Game
method: bring home the bargains, and lull husband into acceptance by having him
guess how incredibly little you’d paid for each one.
She’d pull a catch of the day from its bag and say, “Guess
how much I paid for this sweater.”
He’d say, “Twenty dollars.”
“Too high,” she’d reply with a smirk.
“Okay. Fifteen.”
“Too high.”
“Ten.”
“Nope. Eight-ninety-nine. I’m good.”
And she was. As far as Tiffany was concerned, the three
sexiest words in the English language were fifty percent off. She was a
world-class bargain hunter (not surprising, since she’d sat at the feet of an
expert – her mom), and she could smell a sale a mile away.
Great as she was at ferreting out a bargain, she wasn’t good
with credit cards. It hadn’t taken Tiffany long to snarl her finances to the point
where she and Brian had to use their small, start-a-family savings and Brian’s
car fund to bail her out.
She’d felt awful about that, not only because she suspected
they’d never need that family fund anyway (that suspicion was what led to her
first shopping binge), but because Brian had suffered from the fallout of her
mismanagement. He’d had his eye on some rusty old beater on the other side of
the lake and had been talking about buying and restoring it. The car wound up
rusting at someone else’s house, thanks to her. Even the money they’d scraped
together for her bailout wasn’t enough. She’d had to call in the big guns:
Daddy. That had probably been harder on Brian than waving good-bye to their
savings.
Sheila
Roberts lives in the Pacific Northwest. She's happily married and has three
children.
Writing since
1989, Sheila’s books have been printed in several different languages and have
been chosen for book clubs such as Doubleday as well as for Readers Digest
Condensed books. Her best-selling novel ON STRIKE FOR CHRISTMAS was made into a
movie and appeared on the Lifetime Movie Network, and her novel THE NINE LIVES
OF CHRISTMAS has just been optioned for film. Her novel ANGEL LANE was named
one of Amazon’s Top Ten Romances for 2009.
When she's
not making public appearances or playing with her friends, she can be found
writing about those things near and dear to women's hearts: family, friends,
and chocolate.
website:
http://www.sheilasplace.com
find me on
Facebook as Sheila Roberts, author
Twitter:
_Sheila_Roberts
Amazon buy
link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/125004376X/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d1_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0YXFTNH3EDEBDFNAE8E7&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1630083502&pf_rd_i=507846
GIVEAWAY:
Sheila will be awarding a copy of Small Change and a $25 Visa gift card to a randomly drawn commenter during the tour (US ONLY), and a $25 Visa gift card to a randomly drawn host.
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I enjoyed the excerpt, thank you.