cover image My Charmed Life

My Charmed Life

Beth Bernstein. New American Library, $15 trade paper (320p) ISBN -978-0-451-23693-7

Throughout her life, jewelry designer Bernstein’s best friend is her mother, Shirley, a relationship she explores with tenderness, humor, and candidness after Shirley died suddenly in her mid-50s. Whether it’s to wake up her single-parent mother at 3 a.m. to dish about her first kiss or to get encouragement as she struggles with job dissatisfaction, her mother is always there to say exactly the right thing. Shirley, a lover of baubles like her mother and grandmother, is the one who pushes Bernstein to combine her passions for writing and jewelry, which leads her to a new career as a fashion director at a magazine. Following her mother’s death, Bernstein quits and begins creating jewelry that she sells to people she knows, which leads to launching her own line. As her creative life takes off she reconnects with her emotionally distant father, who became indifferent and disappointed in her after her parents divorced, the fallout of that formerly warm-turned-fraught bond reverberating for decades in the choices Bernstein makes with men. Taking a break from dating, she pursues investment jewelry, having overcome a belief instilled by her father that certain jewelry should only be bought by a man for a woman and purchased a diamond necklace. The hard-won confidence that allows her to kick her noncommittal Italian boyfriend to the curb and contentedly buy herself the exquisite ring he won’t give her is a triumph of empowerment that will resonate for those both single and married. (July)