Mercury News

September 19, 2008 at 9:13 a.m.

Categories:News

One day at a mall in Ventura, a real estate agent named Jonell McLain had a retail
epiphany. She had just sold a house and wanted to buy her clients a box of candy.

But as McLain passed a jewelry store something stopped her in her tracks. It was a
diamond necklace. “It was, she thought, simply exquisite — and exquisitely simple.” It
was morally indefensible and outrageously expensive. And yet.

“Over the next three weeks, Jonell was surprised how often she thought about the
diamond necklace,” Cheryl Jarvis writes in “The Necklace,” an inspirational-bling book
that means to position itself somewhere between “The Five People You Meet in
Heaven” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” McLain’s innocence turned
inspirational when she realized she could buy the necklace for entirely unselfish and
uplifting reasons