Blueprints A Novel

Name: Blueprints A Novel
Author: Barbara Delinsky
ISBN: 9781250007063

by Barbara Delinsky

432 pages2016St. Martin's Publishing GroupISBN 9781250007063

FictionWomenFamily Life

About this book

Returning to her beloved New England, the New York Times bestselling author of Sweet Salt Air explores the limits of love and asks what happens when the right man comes along at the wrong time? Caroline and Jamie McAfee are close. Not only do they enjoy their relationship as mother and daughter, they're in business together as the team that fronts the popular home renovation show Gut It! All is well with these two strong women, but when the network tells Caroline that Jamie is to replace her as host, Caroline feels betrayed by her daughter and old in the eyes of the world. Jamie is unsettled by the cast change and devastated by her mother's anger, but she has little time to brood when a tragic accident leaves her two-year-old half-brother in her care. Accustomed to a life of order and precision, Jamie suddenly finds herself out of her depth, grappling with a toddler who misses his parents and a fiancé who doesn't want the child. Amid such devastation, Caroline and Jamie find themselves revising the blueprints they've built their lives around. With loyalties shifting and decisions looming, mother and daughter need each other; but the rift between them is proving difficult to mend. As the women try to remake themselves and rebuild their relationship with each other, they discover that strength and even passion can come from the unlikeliest places. For Caroline, it's an old friend, whose efforts to seduce her awaken desires that have been dormant for so long that she feels foreign to herself. For Jamie, it's a staggering new attraction that allows her to breathe again-and breathe deeply-for the first time in forever. A riveting novel from a master storyteller, Barbara Delinsky's Blueprints reminds us that sometimes love appears when we least expect it, and when we need it most.

Publication Details

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2016
Pages: 432
ISBN: 9781250007063
Language: en

About Barbara Delinsky

Barbara Ruth Greenberg was born on August 9, 1945, in Newton, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, where she raised in a family of lawyers. Her mother died of breast cancer, when she was eight, it was the defining event of a childhood that was otherwise ordinary. She took piano lessons and flute lessons. She took ballroom dancing lessons. She went to summer camp through her fifteenth year (in Maine, which explains the setting of so many of her stories), then spent her sixteenth summer learning to type and to drive (two skills that have served her better than all of her other high school courses combined). In 1967, she earned a B.A. in psychology at Tufts University and an M.A. in sociology at Boston College in 1969. The motivation behind the M.A. was sheer greed. Her husband, Steve Delinsky, was just starting law school and they needed the money. Following graduate school, she was a researcher for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. After the birth of her first child, Andrew, she took a job as a photographer and reporter for the Belmont Herald newspaper, and later for the Boston Herald. She also filled her time doing volunteer work at hospitals, and serving on the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and their Women's Cancer Advisory Board. Barbara's career in writing began in 1980, after having a pair of twins, Eric and Jeremy, when she read a newspaper article about romance fiction. She researched the field, read 40 to 50 category romances and sat down to begin her own. She found that her background in psychology was helpful in "planning the emotional entanglements of (her) characters," and claims that she has "pulled on virtually every aspect of (her) background and of (her) life experience in general (in her writing)." Barbara Delinsky is nothing if not prolific. Since 1980, she has written well over 80 novels, and shows no sign of slowing down. She began signing her novels