Hand-Me-Down Heartache

New, from the author of Sorority Sisters, a novel about a young woman navigating the sometimes rocky terrain of family, career, and relationships.

After graduating from college, Nina Lander moves back in with her parents as she temps and tries to secure a "real" job. She isn't finding it very easy to break into television broadcasting, and her parents' strained marriage has made living at home even more depressing. But when she meets Maurice, a promising basketball rookie, Nina feels as if she's found the one. She is determined to make the relationship work, despite evidence that Maurice isn't always faithful, which hurts Nina but doesn't surprise her. Her father cheated on her mother, and her brother cheats on his girlfriends thus she has low expectations of the men in her life.

When Nina's chance encounter with Leo, a high school classmate who's become a successful rapper, sends Maurice into a jealous rage, it is not long before Nina's friends are urging her to let Maurice go. Even though she finds her dream job as a sports reporter for a local television station, Nina still can't keep Maurice out of her mind. To complicate matters, Leo seems to be everything Maurice is not. Nina must decide between a man she loves who treats her wrong and a man who is willing to do everything right.

But all of this takes a backseat when her mother falls ill and Nina puts her life on hold to take care of her. As both mother and daughter examine their relationships with the men in their lives, and as Nina's mother finally confronts her husband about his mistreatment of her, Nina finds the strength to break the chain of heartache.

In Hand-me-down Heartache, author Tajuana TJ Butler has crafted a heartwarming novel about the strength of relationships among women, be they family or friends.

New, from the author of Sorority Sisters, a novel about a young woman navigating the sometimes rocky terrain of family, career, and relationships.

After graduating from college, Nina Lander moves back in with her parents as she temps and tries to secure a "real" job.

Publishers Weekly

Seasoned Christian suspense novelist Blackstock disappoints with this run-of-the-mill romance. The second Christian novel this year (Linda Dorrell's True Believers is the other) to focus on the renovation of a church and, in particular, the female protagonist's design of its stained glass windows, this story features a lovestruck pair of artists who are supposed to be offbeat and tortured, but in fact are ill-defined and bland. Brooke, a 20-something stained glass artist who, amid scandal, left her hometown immediately after her high school graduation, comes back to do a job and face the gossips who drove her away. Unfortunately for readers, the scandal a misinterpreted hug between student and teacher has no teeth, and it strains credulity to think that any town, even the caricaturish Hayden, Mo., could make so much of so little. Also problematic is that the former teacher, who is only six years Brooke's senior, is motivated to convert her to Christianity mostly because he wants to marry her, but would never marry an unbeliever. Stereotypes abound, including a wealthy, almost mechanically mean-spirited villainess and an Italian family complete with a dead grandfather whose clich?d proverbs are remembered in over-the-top dialect ("You put-a care and-a love into everything you do, Nicky, and that's-a quality"). Blackstock generates enough interest in these characters and their predicaments to keep the pages turning, but the novel's predictable conclusion is telegraphed from the first page. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Tajuana “TJ” Butler is the author of the novel Sorority Sisters and the forthcoming The Night Before Thirty. She has published a collection of poetry, Desires of a Woman, and is a gifted public speaker. She lives in Los Angeles. For more information about Butler and her books, publicity tour, and other news, visit her website at www.tjbutler.com.