Main Characters: Fredericka Hildebrand Ware
Series: None (that I know of)
The Junior League of Willow Creek, Texas, is très exclusive. Undesirables need not apply. Fredericka Mercedes Hildebrand Ware (Frede to her friends) is a member beyond reproach…until her life begins to unravel. When her husband betrays her, steals her money, and runs off to places unknown, it’s something Frede would prefer to keep under wraps. The last thing she needs is to become fodder for the JLWC gossip mill. And to make matters worse, there’s only one person in town who stands a chance at helping her get revenge – Howard Grout, a tasteless, gold-chain-wearing lawyer who has bought his way into Frede’s tony neighborhood. But there’s a price: She has to get his tacky, four-inch-stiletto-and-pink-spandex-wearing wife, Nikki, into the Junior League.
The crème de la crème of Southern royalty should sit up and take notice, and hang on tight for this irresistible tale of getting in and getting even.
I first read The Ex-Debutante by Linda Francis Lee earlier this year and I adored it. I adored it so much that I couldn’t wait to read this book but then you know how those things go. A couple of weeks pass and the book falls off your radar until you see something somewhere and you’re like, “Oh yeah, I wanted to read that book”…well that’s what happened with me and this book.
I started it a couple of nights ago and it started out pretty good. There was a lot of stuff going on in the book between Frede (pronounced Freddy, not Freed) and her low down dirty shame of a rat bastard husband, Gordon. Frede thinks she’s pregnant and wants to make sure so she cuts her day early and heads home to take a pregnancy test but when she gets there, her entire world falls apart.
She was born and bred a Southern lady so the way that she handled the whole betrayal drove me up the effing wall. I wanted to slap some damn sense into Frede more than once while reading this book. Her whole “must be a lady at all costs and at all times” drove me insane. It took her a while but she finally got mad enough (and humiliated enough) that she went to the one person that is not popular by any means in her world.
She went to Howard Grout, attorney at law to help her with her case against her husband and if there is anyone who will nail Gordon’s balls to the wall, it was Howard.
When I first picked up this book, I thought the romance was going to be between Frede and Howard but I was wrong. Howard is already happily married to the woman of his dreams and he wants, as payment for his services, Frede to get her into the Willow Creek Junior League. Howard’s wife is a loud color wearing sweet woman who would never in a million years fit in with the crowd over at the Junior League but she’s in a peculiar spot right now. Having grown up poor and now being rich, she doesn’t fit in with the people she used to know and the rich people don’t really want them hanging around with them so she’s kind of lost. She needs somewhere to fit in. In short, she needs and wants friends.
Howard, being the loving husband that he is, wants this for her and he’ll do whatever it takes to see his wife happy with friends….even if it means buying his way into this damn Junior League.
So Frede needs Howard’s help and Howard needs Frede’s help so the adventure begins.
Reading as Frede and Nikki (who were childhood friends that drifted apart) build on their friendship again was sweet. I enjoyed it, mostly because I adored Nikki. I thought she was such a sweet spirit and enjoyed her addition to the cast of characters in this book. Whats even more, I hecka loved her friend, Sawyer. The fairy artist (in Howard’s words). I thought he was sexy and his hard stares and long looks whenever Frede was around had me all kinds of excited to get to know him better.
I thought this book was a great way to spend a few hours. Seeing the way that Frede and Howard brought Gordon down and then watching Gordon squirm when Frede finally bested him totally made up for all of the times that Frede’s Southern lady crap popped up. The whole Pilar thing caught me by surprise but I’m glad that things ended the way that it did.
The ending was a lot different from what I’m used to but I didn’t exactly hate it. I enjoyed the book overall and was surprised by how funny it was. I enjoyed the little adventures that Frede went on while trying to whip Nikki into a gentle lady. But my favorite part of this book was most definitely Nina. She flat out rocked!
If you haven’t read this book and you enjoy chick lit type romances then I would definitely recommend this.
Book cover and blurb credit: http://barnesandnoble.com
Sounds fun but I’m kind of more interested in the lawyer and his wife.*sigh* sometimes that happens, though.
Nice review!!
Thanks and they got a lot of page time though the story is told in first person from Frede’s POV so we only get what Frede is thinking and feeling toward them. But they were still great characters.