The Invention of Sarah Cummings by Olivia Newport

Back Cover: Sarah Cummings has one goal in life - to break into Chicago's high society. Desperate to stop serving dinner to members of the wealthy Banning family and to start eating at society tables, Sarah spends her meagre free time altering cast-off gowns to create the perfect wardrobe for her future life.

When opportunity knocks at a chance meeting, she presents herself as Serena Cuthbert, weaving a fictions past to go with her fictitious name. But as she gets closer to her goal - and closer to Simon Tewell, director of St. Andrew's Orphanage - Sarah finds that she must choose between the life she has and the life she dreams of.

Can she piece together the perfect life from scraps? or will it all come unraveled in the face of true love.

Review: Sarah Cummings has a pretty good life. She works in the prestigious Banning home serving the high society Banning family. She is treated fairly and kindly, but she is merely staff. As a child, her father, a middle class man, dreamed of creating a better life for his daughter than he had. He wanted Sarah to rise up in the world and to not know the constraints or limits of being in the working class. Despite being orphaned at a young age, Sarah's heart never let go of that dream. More than anything, she wants to be wealthy. She wants a life of luxury. She wants to have her own maids, not to be a maid herself.

Sarah is highly driven to live a better life. She is willing to sacrifice everything to walk in the circles that she envisions herself worthy of. She is not a maid. She was never meant to be a maid. With every brush of her duster and swish of her mop, her resentment towards her lot in life grows and her determination to change it strengthens. She is fierce in her goals to enter the upper society and sacrifices sleep, her identity, and the love of a humble man to build the character of Serena Cuthbert - a beautiful, proud, confident, clever, stunningly dressed, and enchanting heiress.

However, things begin to unravel as her life as Sarah Cummings and her identity of Serena Cuthbert start to overlap and people begin to figure out the truth. As her fictional life explodes, Sarah has to figure out how to patch together the pieces of her real life, the life of Sarah Cummings, in the wake of the distrust and deceit woven by Serena Cuthbert.

Book has been provided courtesy of Baker Publishing Group and Graf-Martin Communications , Inc.
Available at your favourite bookseller from Revell , a division of Baker Publishing Group