Best friends for nearly twenty years, three women, all with the same birthday, plan to get together at a summerhouse in Maine to celebrate their approaching fortieth birthdays by taking stock of their lives, loves, choices, and dreams, only to be given the chance to each relive three crucial months from their past. 250,000 first printing. What if a woman could go back to the beginning and rethink her choices for love and life? When Leslie Headrick, Madison Appleby, and Ellie Abbott first met, they were in their early 20s and the world lay before them with its infinite possibilities. Now that they're about to turn 40, they reunite for a weekend at a summerhouse in Maine where they share the details of their lives during the past 20 years. Each woman has serious doubts and questions about the path she chose to follow, but none of them suspect the startling opportunity they're about to be offered to relive those choices and change their futures. Thought-provoking, entertaining, and downright delightful, Jude Deveraux's The Summerhouse deftly develops the individual stories of the three women in fascinating detail while maintaining the overall focus on the central tale. The ties of sisterhood and shared experience that bind the three resonate with depth and clarity--no wonder then that Deveraux is a perennial favorite with readers. There is little doubt that this volume will join her lengthy list of bestsellers. --Lois Faye Dyer Serendipity brings three career women together at the DMV in New York City on their twenty-first birthdays. Ellie, cute and perky, is a hopeful artist. Leslie is an aspiring dancer, and Madison is in New York to pursue a modeling career. Nineteen years later, Ellie, a successful popular fiction writer who hasn't written for three years, asks the other two to meet at a summerhouse in Maine to find out if their lives went as wrong as hers. Beautiful Madison tells the group about giving up modeling to nurse an ungrateful (now ex) husband, and Leslie talks about leaving the dance world to marry the boy back home, who now may be cheating on her. But neither is as bitter about men as Ellie, whose ex-husband has taken all her money and her self-confidence. The catharsis achieved by their confessions is helpful, but what really changes their lives is the mysterious Madame Zoya, who promises to let them relive any three weeks of their lives and to choose a new path or remain with the old. Deveraux is at the top of her game here as she uses the time-travel motif that was so popular in A Knight in Shining Armor (1996), successfully updating it with a female buddy twist that will make fans smile. Patty Engelmann Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Jude Deveraux is the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers, including The Summerhouse, Temptation, High Tide, The Blessing, An Angel for Emily, Legend, and A Knight in Shining Armor. Chapter One Leslie Headrick looked out her kitchen window at the old summerhouse in the back. Now, in early fall, the vines and twisted stems of the old roses nearly covered the building, but in the winter you could see the glassed-in porch well. You could see the peeling paint and the cracked glass in the little round window above the front door. One of the side doors was hanging on one hinge, and Alan said it was a danger to anyone who walked past the place. In fact, Alan said that the whole structure was a danger and should be torn down. At that thought, Leslie turned away from the window and looked back at her beautiful, perfect kitchen. Just last year Alan had gutted her old kitchen and put in this one. "It's the best that money can buy," he'd said about the maple cabinets and the solid- surface countertops. And Leslie was sure that it was the best, but she missed her ratty old Welsh dresser and the little breakfast nook in the corner. "That table and those chairs look like something kids made in a shop class," Alan had said, and Leslie had agreed -- but their perspective of what was beautiful differed. As always, Leslie had given in to her husband and let him put in this showplace of a kitchen, and now she felt that she was ruining a piece of art when she baked cookies and messed up the perfect surfaces that scratched so easily. She poured herself another cup of tea from the pot, strong, black English tea, loose tea, no wimpy tea bags for her, then turned back to again look out at the summerhouse. This was a day for reflecting because in three more days she was going to be forty years old -- and she was going to celebrate her birthday with two women she hadn't seen or heard from in nineteen years. Behind her, in the hallway, her two suitcases were packed and waiting. She was taking a lot of clothing because she didn't know what the other two women were going to be wearing, and Ellie's letter had been vague. "For a famous writer, she doesn't say much," Alan had said in an unpleasant tone of voice. He had been q