Book Review: Sisterhood of The Queen Mamas

A woman wears many hats in one lifetime —

Why shouldn’t one of them be a crown?

Meet Maxine and Odessa, the Queen Mamas of Castlerock, Texas. They may be getting on in years, but good luck keeping up with them!

Most days they’re on the prowl at the Five Acres of Fabulous Finds Flea Market, searching for treasures among the trash, and turning life on its heels for:

— Jan, the “perfect” former cheerleader with a big secret

— Bernadette, the bridal shop owner who seems destined for singlehood

— Chloe, the trouble magent needing fashion intervention . . . and a boyfriend makeover

Grab your shopping bags and join the feisty Queen Mamas as they dish out relationship repair, tag-sale tactics and humor that is truly priceless.

Annie Jones is a beloved, bestselling author who’s written more than 19 titles for houses including Multnomah and Waterbrook. She is currently writing for Steeple Hill Café and Love Inspired. Her awards include a Virginia RWA Holt Medallion, for which she was a finalist an unprecedented four times, and an Affaire De Coeur award for Best Inspirational Fiction. THE PRAYER TREE and SAVING GRACE (Multnomah) were on Ingram’s “most requested books in America” lists. The Houston Chronicle named Annie best Christian fiction author of 1999 for a series of romantic comedies she wrote for Waterbrook.
She also writes as Luanne Jones, and her novel published under that name, THE DIXIE BELLE’S GUIDE TO LOVE (2002), was chosen by the Literary Guild, a rare occurrence for a mass market book, and voted one of the top 5 romances of 2002 by Library Journal, which praised it as “Written with sass and style and brimming with endearingly eccentric yet wonderfully memorable characters, this is an unabashed delight.”

Annie lives with her husband and two children.

My Impressions:

The Sisterhood of The Queen Mamas by Annie Jones has been in my TBR pile for a while now.  I read two of Jones’ other books a few years ago (Sadie-in-Wating and Mom over Miami) and thought this book would be as good.  It wasn’t.  Now, I am not saying that it was bad, just that I didn’t enjoy it as much as the other two.  Odessa Pepperdine is a 60-something, big-haired, retired minister’s wife from deep in the heart of Texas.  She and sidekick and fellow retired minister’s wife, Maxine, rule the flea market in town.  Not content to stick to shopping and lunching, they set out to improve the lives of their flea market foundlings.  A humorous book, Sisterhood, is a tad tedious at times.  The characters are all quirky and colorful, but I wanted more story and less color during my reading.  Jones uses just about every pun in the book, and it was just too much.

Sisterhood won’t keep me from reading any more of Annie Jones’ books.  I liked the other two that much and hope this one just wasn’t my taste.