Books I've read this week - Sugar Time

Sugar Time by Jane Adams ©2009

About the book: “Charlotte “Sugar’ Kane hasn’t brought in a hit TV show for 20 years. She’s about to prove she still can, even if she’s an old broad in a youth-obsessed business, when she’s blind-sided by a medical malady that could cost her the pilot if anyone knew about it as well as ruin her chance to turn it into a winning series. She manages to keep her secret from the conniving young assistant who wants her show, and even from her grown kids and closest friends. And when she falls in love with Alex Carroll, she can’t tell him either: “What man who’s still got what it takes wants a woman with a condition?” But Alex has a secret of his own, and by the time Sugar learns it, she’ll have to face the hardest decision of all for a woman of a certain age who gets her last chance at both love and success - and knows that getting one means giving up the other.”

I almost put this down after reading a few pages. Why would I be interested in reading about a Jewish career woman ‘of a certain age’, (my age!), divorced and single, with grown kids and health problems? Don’t I have enough problems of my own? But as I read and got to know Sugar better, I begin to get interested in her life. She’s a television producer/writer who needs her latest show to be a success even if working all hours ends up killing her. She has an angina attack and is told to slow down and to try and eliminate stress in her life before she has a real heart attack. She meets a wonderful man and they hit it off immediately. She never tells him or her family about her medical condition because she doesn’t want the kids to worry and she thinks the man wouldn’t want anything to do with her. She has to decide what matters to her most and how she arrives at that decision is the basis for the book. It’s a good chick-lit book even if the heroine is a little older than most in today’s stories.