Eight-year-old Jane Margaux is the daughter of a chic and famous Broadway producer. And since her mother is always busy producing musical hits and her father is mostly vacationing with his new trophy wife in Nantucket, she seems to spend a whole lot of time on her own. That's all right though, because Michael, her imaginary friend, is always there. But what's going to happen to her when Michael leaves her after her ninth birthday? He doesn't want to leave her, but he must. Alas, she won't remember him anyway, so it doesn't matter. Michael is somewhere in his early to mid thirties -- a handsome man with magnetic green eyes. His job is to be a child's imaginary friend for a while. He cannot be seen by grownups during these assignments. Then he lives a semi-normal life whenever he's on sabbatical. Twenty-three years later, he sees Jane again. She's a grownup now, working on turning her musical production into a feature film. The play is based on her relationship with Michael. She has never been able to forget her imaginary friend, no matter what he had told her. Her life is sort of a mess -- a controlling mother, an actor boyfriend who is using her, and an imaginary friend she can't seem to get off her mind. What happens when Jane and Michael are face to face after so many years? And how is it possible that this man -- someone she had thought was a figment of her imagination -- is actually real?
Sundays at Tiffany's reminds me of The Velveteen Rabbit, where the boy's love makes the rabbit real. James Patterson got the help of Gabrielle Charbonnet, a children's book writer, to create this modern-day romantic fantasy. The love story itself is simple and beautiful. I have to admit, however, that the whole concept of a man falling in love with a woman he had been close to when she was a child seemed kind of creepy at first, but Patterson handles it well. This is one of Patterson's love stories, not one of his thrillers, and his tear-jerkers have always reminded me of Nicholas Sparks. The one big difference is that Sparks's novels seem to be targeted to older, middle-aged/elderly readers, whereas Patterson's books are based on younger characters and therefore more fun. I give this book three stars because I couldn't quite understand Michael's job very well. The explanation is insufficient. Also, the whole thing with Jane's mother strikes me as strange. Isn't this the woman who forgot her daughter's ninth birthday? And I can't get over how short this book is. With the giant font size on 309 pages (with some empty pages in between a few of the chapters), this is more like a novella, sold at the price of a full-length novel. I really, really hate it when publishers do that. So greedy. Other than that, Sundays at Tiffany's is an enchanting novel, but I'd wait for the paperback or bargain price edition. The overpriced hardcover gets 0 stars, the story itself gets three stars.
