Pam Wheeler checked every box: Happy marriage? Check. Fantastic kid? Check. Booming career? Check. So when her husband dies in a freak accident and their DIY empire goes on life support, Pam must fix the relationship with her troubled and grief-stricken daughter and save the family business.Pam and Nate were a couple who just couldn’t get away from each other, sharing not only their bed, but also … from each other, sharing not only their bed, but also a successful lifestyle empire as DIY home renovators, bloggers, podcasters, and co-authors.
When Nate dies in a freak accident, Pam becomes a 44-year-old widow, at once too young and too old—too young to be thrust into widowhood and too old to rejoin the dating pool.
Now the single mother of a headstrong and grief-stricken teenager, Pam’s life becomes a juggling act between dealing with her loss and learning how to parent by herself. On top of all that she also must reinvent herself or lose the empire that she and Nate had built so carefully.
Now is the time for Pam to seize the opportunity to step up as a mother, come out from behind Nate’s shadow, and rise as the sole face of the Designer You brand, and maybe, possibly, hopefully, find love again.
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Designer You is Sarahlyn Bruck’s debut novel and a beautifully wrought story about the effect of loss on relationships. We follow the main character, Pam, as she struggles to define herself after her husband’s death. Pam faces self-disappointment and inadequacy – especially in the eyes of her daughter, Grace. The good news is that, in Sarahlyn Bruck’s hands, the characters are molded with the care and delicacy of a seasoned writer. While not a suspense novel per se, what I enjoyed most about this story is the way it drew me in emotionally and kept me holding on until the last breath. Bravo Sarahlyn Bruck!
What a fabulous debut! I adored this novel – a story of grief, moving on, families and second chances. Beautifully written with vivid characters, I felt the pain and challenges experienced by Pam as she is thrust into a life that doesn’t resemble the one she had worked so hard to build with her late-husband. Realistic, warm and wise, not to mention, ultimately, rather uplifting, this book is one I’d highly recommend. Sarahlyn Bruck is an author to watch!
This book was stunningly well-written. It’s about a woman and her daughter who must rebuild after a loss. Depressing, you think? No. Instead it’s uplifting and beautiful. Even if you haven’t experienced a loss, you’ll fall in love with the gritty determination evidenced by these characters.
This is an exquisitely written story filled with honesty that is sometimes ugly, and a depth of emotion that occasionally hits below the belt.
Ms. Bruck’s characters are so relatable – it was easy to both love and not love them, almost simultaneously.
I look forward to her next endeavor!
Pam Wheeler has it all—Nate, her gorgeous, talented husband whom she adores, a mega successful home design empire they run together, and Grace, their spunky fifteen year old daughter—but when Nate falls to his death while building a roof deck on their Philadelphia home, Pam is forced to grieve this unthinkable loss and reinvent herself all at the same time.
Without Nate’s charismatic persona, Pam realizes that the business they created together, Designer You, doesn’t feel the same. He was the face of the business and she can’t summon the energy to travel and make the personal appearances necessary to keep the business afloat. She adores the interior design part of the business, but has no penchant for the necessary technical aspects. While Pam is focused on the floundering business, Grace begins acting out in more and more risky ways, leaving Pam to choose between her business and her child.
I loved this candid exploration of the grief—the way it affects people in different ways, reframes things that seemed immutable, and changes long established relationships. Pam and Grace must get to know each other anew in order to move on with their lives and try to fill the gaping hole Nate left behind. As they travel through the stages of grief and begin to see the light at the end of the dark tunnel, both characters must learn to shuffle their priorities in order to move on.
The ending felt just a bit rushed—I wanted a few more chapters to see how both Pam and Grace’s relationship and their future have changed in their new reality. I did like that the ending left some questions unanswered, but I did feel there could have been a bit more development before the conclusion. However, I really enjoyed getting to know Pam and Grace and all of the secondary characters as well (especially Becky). Bruck’s writing is fresh and lively and she kept me turning the pages to find out how the Wheelers would recover from this horrible tragedy.
This is a gorgeous debut from Sarahlynn Bruck, heart-wrenching and beautifully-written. Designer You starts with a gut-punch and gets better with each page. My soul ached for Pam from page 1, and I didn’t want to stop reading. I can’t wait for Bruck’s next book.
Favorite Quotes:
She was sick with rage and fear that Nate had the audacity to be dead on today of all days. Insensitive jerk. Just the idea of getting up on stage by herself made her stomach cramp and she’d been in and out of the bathroom during the entire flight.
Pam thought her entire outfit didn’t cost half as much as the shoes the hostess was wearing. At once, she felt too young and unsophisticated, like the kid at the adult table at Thanksgiving who longs to be back at the kids’ table with her younger cousins eating turkey in front of a Disney cartoon.
She wasn’t sure what hurt more, the casualness with which Grace could just fling insults at her or the fact that so often those insults were based in truth.
Nate himself would never fade, but those little details would start to get fuzzy in the same way any memory blurs over time. She clung to the impossible wish that she could hold onto everything about Nate, save it all onto a disk or a thumb drive, and whenever she wasn’t sure about the details of an experience she’d had with him, she could pull it up on her laptop and experience that trip, that meal, that birthday, all over again.
My Review:
I grew increasingly restless as I pushed through this book – it really wasn’t to my taste. I should have stopped reading and pushed this one in the DNF pile. The premise had promise and while there were a few glimmers of entertaining observations, I found the overall execution to be mundane and morose. I kept waiting for the story to improve and sadly, it just never did. While it wasn’t bad, it was just middle of the road, real-life humdrum type of okay. The characters were exasperating and annoying and weren’t people I could care for or about, nor were they endearing to me, as the mourning widow seemed to have bailed on everything except finishing her deceased husband’s projects. Her priorities were askew and in particular, she wasn’t parenting and selfishly leaving her grieving teenaged daughter fending for herself and growing increasingly resentful, defiant and obnoxious, and making extremely poor choices. Like many neglectful parents, instead of seeking help or providing consequences, she threw money at it and little else until it was too late. By the time the mother finally gained some insights and their relationship had started to turn around, the story stopped. And I truly mean it just stopped, without an ending, which is something I find particularly irksome. But maybe it is just me, as this story seems to have tripped several landmines in the field of my pet peeves.