Best Friends Are Like Suspenders
Bev Van Horn
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Beverly's Limited
ISBN: 0967188555

They Hold You Up When You Are Falling Down. Women help each other as a daughter dies of AIDS contracted while drawing blood from an HIV+ patient.

With a Foreword by Scott Blades, Executive Director of the Tucson Interfaith HIV/AIDS Network, which explains a little about AIDS in America, Best Friends Are Like Suspenders covers the years when Bev & her best friend Lin, are on their second marriages, maturing as businesswomen, & coping with all the surprises of life.

Each chapter has a quotation about friendship, such as:
•  Strangers are just friends waiting to happen.
•  A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.
•  A simple friend has never seen you cry. A real friend has shoulders soggy from your tears.
•  Good friends are hard to find, harder to leave, and impossible to forget.
•  A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.

Best Friends Are Like Suspenders recounts the true story, in brief glimpses with few detailed explanations, of the trials & joys in the lives of two mature women. Bev's second marriage is falling apart while Lin runs a prosperous store, tends to her marriage & keeps in touch with her children ... & then Lacey, her 20 year-old daughter, working with a full-blown AIDS patient, is jostled while drawing blood & the needle lodges in her arm. Now Lacey has to begin to live with AIDS.

Bev struggles to keep her boutiques open, one in Colorado & the other in Tucson -- juggling her credit cards, mortgages & loans -- while fooling herself that her husband loves her, which he does except he has simply been lying to her -- about his finances -- about what he does all day.

We follow Bev & Lin for six years as their lives completely change. Bev sorts through the debris of her marriage, meeting her friends, running her businesses. & then she meets Bob.

Written tightly, sparsely, mostly in conversations, we see the unfolding of those last years of Lacey's life. How the mother & friend become involved in AIDS Walks & TIHAN.

Best Friends Are Like Suspenders is an absorbing little read, taking you out of your own life into another's -- leaving you to ask: “What would I do if & when this comes into my life?”

At the end are some FAQs about HIV/AIDS in America today.

More from Bev Van Horn:
Covered Wagon Women.
She has contributed: A Tale about Literary Agents & has been Interviewed
(02/08/04)

Rebecca