The Summer of Sunshine and Margot

The Baxter women have a long, well-documented record of falling for men who leave. Fraternal twins Margot and Sunshine have each drawn a different lesson from it, and one summer in Los Angeles puts both conclusions to the test.

Margot, an etiquette coach, takes a live-in job smoothing a scandalous aging film star, Bianca, into someone who can pass as a diplomat's wife. The work comes with a converted-monastery mansion and with Bianca's intensely private son, Alec, whose reserve Margot finds far more interesting than she should.

Sunshine has spent her adult life abandoning jobs for men who used her, and has resolved to finish her degree, take her work as a nanny seriously, and under no circumstances fall for her employer, a widowed single father raising a boy who badly needs her.

Susan Mallery writes the two sisters with equal seriousness, and the novel's warmth comes less from either romance than from what the twins are to each other.