[In the following review, Ferguson summarizes the "uncomplicated" message of How Stella Got Her Groove Back.]

Divorced at 42, with an 11-year-old son and a lucrative job in investment banking, Stella Payne splits her time between a "funky little California castle" outside San Francisco and a cabin at Lake Tahoe. She's got four computers in her office, a personal trainer, a pool and two steam rooms—but make no mistake, it's lonely at the top. "Once you get past the 200,000-a-year mark you are constantly being appraised and as a result always trying to prove your worth," the buppie heroine complains in her infectiously intimate you-go!-girl run-on style. "It's too hectic up here and the race is always on. It's always rush hour but I haven't figured out when to put on my blinker because it's safe to change lanes and I'm also not sure which exit I should take to get off this track altogether." What Stella needs is a little loving. And so, after the inevitable shopping spree (nightgowns, sexy bras and panties, six or seven bathing suits for a nine-day trip), our new best girlfriend heads to an adults-only resort in Jamaica and straight into the arms of a sweet-smelling "maple-syrup-colored" local hunk—who happens to be all of 20 years old. Terry McMillan's first novel since her 1992 best seller, Waiting to Exhale, is a guilty-pleasure sex-and-shopping fantasy of the first order, sprinkled with asides on rap music and feminine hygiene and featuring a message as uncomplicated as a glass of fresh-squeezed papaya juice: If aging men can rev their engines with pretty young trophy wives, why can't middle-aged women treat themselves to dreamy, dishy boy toys?