TOGETHER ALONE

Suffering and surviving in a hot-chocolate cosmos: Delinsky (For My Daughters, p. 495, etc.) serves up another successful nontaxing romance to carry women from the stress of their workdays into the untroubled oblivion of sleep. Can a heroine who spends her weekends baking pies, stripping wallpaper from her bathrooms (that's plural), and grinding her own coffee beans for an abusive husband find happiness? At least happiness that any of the rest of us can stomach reading about? Yes, Delinsky manages to make even this woman sympathetic and understandable. But only after she's undergone a lot of terrible pain. Emily Arkin and her two best friends are ladies in their 40s whose daughters have just left for college. They meet weekly, to love and support one another, at a diner in the small Massachusetts college town where they live. Emily needs some support. A loving and nurturing mother who barely looks older than 16, she is tortured by a tragic past—her infant son, Daniel, was kidnapped and never found—and a fairly lousy present. Her husband, Doug, is never home; he says he's working. A sympathetic police chief (everyone loves Emily, and no one likes Doug) brings widowed detective Brian and his motherless baby daughter, Julia, to rent Emily's garage apartment. Together Emily and Brian fix up the apartment, have long talks (over all the correct homemade foods and romance beverages), and fall in love. Emily finds out that Doug has been living with another woman for eight years. And when Brian digs under a neighbor's willow tree, he finds the body of little Daniel. Emily is reforged in her trials by fire and rises up a more independent woman, supported by her friends, her children, and her macho lover. A mushy and comforting romance. Makes a girl want to move to a small town and bake cookies for the police department. ($225,000 ad/promo)