Tag: women's fiction

The Memory of Lavender and Sage by Aimie K. Runyan

Publication March 5, 2024-Harper Muse Romance-Women’s Fiction-400pp

Book Summary

Food critic Tempèsta Luddington has always felt like the odd person out in her family, ever since she lost her beloved mother at the tender age of thirteen. When her workaholic father passes fifteen years later, Tempèsta is not surprised that the majority of the considerable family money will pass to her dutiful younger brother, Wal. Still, she is left a modest remembrance from her mother, and for the first time Tempèsta has a world of choices before her.

Lost in grief and hoping to reconnect with her memories and her mother’s past, she uses the money to buy a ramshackle manor house in Sainte-Colombe, a small village in Provence, where her mother had grown up. But she is greeted with more questions than answers. Her welcome, especially by the town’s stodgy mayor, is cold at best, and she finds herself wondering if the entire experiment was a mistake.

Yet she stays, stubbornly sticking it out, slowly learning that her mother’s legacy was more than just a nest egg. Through her mother and the village, Tempèsta learns the value of community and friendship, the importance of self-confidence, and the power of love and trust. What’s more, she sees for herself that there is magic and beauty in the everyday—even something as simple as a sprig of lavender and sage.

Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab

Provence on a plate! Aimie Runyan delivers a delectable novel filled with flavorful characters searching for family and identity. Readers travel to Sainte-Colombe in the rolling hills of Provence to villages lined with terra-cotta tiled roofs and brightly painted shutters; housing families that have lived here for generations. The villagers have locked away grief, rejected family expectations, and the need for change.

Main character, Tempesta’s only connection to her late mother is a quilt and the memory of her scent, lavender and sage. Runyan’s descriptions of the landscapes are filled with the same vibrant colors that make up the quilt. Sainte-Colombe, declining in population, is a village with a café, a kitchen shop, and an outdoor market on Fridays. The history of the old language, Occitan, the suspicions and beliefs of villagers, and the challenges of accepting the past are revealed through colorful, endearing villagers who are helping Tempesta adjust from the hurried life of a NYC restaurant critic to a life where the “soil vibrates with potential.” Readers will relax as seeds of hope are sown in the characters. Tempy’s greenhouse filled with herbs is the perfect place for reflection as Runyan uses analogies of growing and plants to enrich the story.

The Memory of Lavender and Sage is a novel of contemporary fiction filled with optimism and finding joy in making things new again. Experience village life in Provence and the sheer beauty in rolling hills of lavender. But best of all become aware of the delicious aroma of herbs mingled with revelations that come from discovering one’s true gift.

Memory of Lavender and Sage takes a trip to Lavender Ridge Farms near Gainesville, Texas-Products similar to Tempesta’s! https://www.lavenderridgefarms.com/

Bright Lights, Big Christmas by Mary Kay Andrews

Publishing September 26-St. Martin’s Press-288pp

Book Summary:

From Mary Kay Andrews, the New York Times bestselling author of The Santa Suit, comes a novella celebrating the magic of Christmas and second chances.

Newly single and unemployed Kerry Tolliver needs a second chance. When she moves back home to her family’s Christmas tree farm in North Carolina, she is guilt tripped into helping her brother, Murphy, sell trees in New York City. She begrudgingly agrees, but she isn’t happy about sharing a trailer with her brother in the East Village for two months. Plus, it’s been years, since before her parents’ divorce, that she’s been to the city to sell Christmas trees.

Then, Kerry meets Patrick, the annoying Mercedes owner who parked in her spot for the first two days. Patrick is recently divorced, a father to a six-year-old son, and lives in the neighborhood. Can Kerry’s first impressions about the recently divorced, single father, and–dare she say, handsome–neighbor be wrong?

Surrounded by warm childhood memories, sparkling possibility, and the magic of Christmas in the City, will Kerry finally get the second chance she needs to find herself… and maybe even find love?

Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab

Ignore the Halloween décor already crowding the store aisles and cozy up with MKA’s Christmas novella. The setting is a street corner in magical New York City where the Tolliver’s Christmas Tree lot is located each year. The tiny 1963 Shasta trailer that Kerry and Murphy squeeze into after driving 700 miles from North Carolina takes center stage as tough competition, social media miracles, and the scary search for a missing friend add to the frantic countdown to Christmas Eve.  MKA tucks a quirky, wise old man, a generous, considerate group of neighbors, some nasty competition, and a handsome single dad and his adorable son, into a Christmas story fit for a snow globe scene. Bright Lights, Big Christmas unwraps the true gifts of the season; loyal friends, devoted family, and discovering love-all on a Christmas tree lot in the middle of New York City. (Cue the twinkle lights and hot chocolate!) 

MKA and her family divide their time between Atlanta and Tybee Island, GA, where they cook up new recipes in three restored beach homes, The Breeze Inn, Ebbtide, and Coquina Cottage—all named after fictional places in Mary Kay’s novels, and all available to rent through Tybee Vacation Rentals. In between cooking, spoiling her grandkids, and plotting her next novel, Mary Kay is an intrepid treasure hunter whose favorite pastime is junking and fixing up old houses. The link to MKA’s website and all her wonderful books! https://marykayandrews.com/

The Bookshop by the Bay by Pamela Kelley

Published June 6, 2023-St. Martin’s Press-Women’s Fiction-320pp

Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab

Southern Charm meets Cape Cod Living. Best friends since childhood, each married with a daughter, Jessica and Allison are at a crossroads in their lives. Needing new direction and time to focus, they reunite on Cape Cod where they grew up. This summer read is filled with contemplations, confessions, and second chances. Kelley explores relationships between grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, budding new couples and divorced couples, stale acquaintances refreshed, burgeoning business partnerships, and unsupportive snooty friends!  Pack all these relationships into one summer on Cape Cod, add a struggling bookshop, and readers have a satisfying, hope filled read. The Bookshop by the Bay checks all the beach read boxes.   

Pamela M. Kelley is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of women’s fiction, family sagas, and suspense. Readers often describe her books as feel-good reads with people you’d want as friends.

She lives in a historic seaside town near Cape Cod and just south of Boston. She has always been an avid reader of women’s fiction, romance, mysteries, thrillers and cook books. There’s also a good chance you might get hungry when you read her books as she is a foodie, and occasionally shares a recipe or two.

Hedge by Jane Delury

Published June 6, 2023-Zibby Books-

Hedge was highlighted by Oprah Daily as one of the Best New Books for Spring and by PEOPLE Magazine as one of the Best Books For Summer! 

Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab

In 2012, Maud is in a disintegrating marriage balancing the demands of motherhood. As a landscape historian in California, she takes on the restoration of Montgomery Place, a 19th century estate in New York’s Hudson Valley, which becomes a geographical and marital separation. Delury’s novel is filled with intricate historic gardening details and planning as Maud’s summer contract involves working with Gabriel, an archaeologist opening a dig in the same area. Reuniting at the end of their California school session, daughters Ella and Louise join Maud at Montgomery Place. The angst and instability of teenage daughter Ella adds a layer of turmoil to Maud’s developing relationship with Gabriel. Funding future projects depends on another budding relationship between wealthy recluse Alice Lincoln and Maud. Each of Delury’s slow growing, needy characters create emotional suspense layered with a hedge of secrecy.
Delury’s plot, twisting and turning like the garden labyrinth at Montgomery Place, sheds light on therapy for teenage fears and anxieties, marital communication and counseling, truth and trust in relationships, forgiveness, and finding a satisfying life path.

Jane Delury holds a BA in English and French literature from UC Santa Cruz, a maîtrise from the University of Grenoble, and an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. A professor at the University of Baltimore, she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts and directs the BA in English. She lives in Baltimore with her daughters and her partner, the writer Don Lee.

Wherever the Wind Takes Us by Kelly Harms

Happy Publication Day- October 18, 2022 by Lake Union Publishing

https://www.amazon.com/Wherever-Wind-Takes-Us-Novel/dp/1662507429

The Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab

Kelly Harms delivers another “sink or swim” adventure of a woman on the brink of a new life. Her main character, Becca, is newly divorced and faced with her past but willing to brace for the future. This tale of a mother and daughter sailing from Maine to Miami takes on a wide range of watery emotions. Becca’s learning to sail hardly compares to the gritty truths and grief at letting go of 22 years of marriage or the ecstasy and joy of discovering the real person below all those layers of the past. Kelly Harm’s novel brings new meaning to finding “the wind in your sails!” The forecast is smooth sailing ahead with Wherever the Wind Takes Us.

Other Books by Kelly Harms:

” Life is short. Read Deliciously.

That’s the message that guides Kelly as she writes what Booklist dubs her “Witty, lively, and au courant,” novels set in the lives of everyday women living outside their everyday circumstances. Combining her trademark “spunky leading ladies you can take to the beach” (Fitness Magazine) with “an honest look at weighty topics (Kirkus Reviews), Kelly keeps readers laughing and thinking year after year, across a dozen languages and every imaginable format. Her works have been #1 bestsellers at Amazon and Audible and garnered more than 40,000 reviews.

A former literary agent and associate editor at HarperCollins Publishers, Kelly speaks on creative living and a life in publishing from both sides of the editor’s desk, at libraries, book clubs, festivals, and wherever good books are sold. She also enjoys working with young adult writers through partnerships with public schools and libraries.” https://kellyharms.com/

Contact: kelly@kellyharms.com

A Place to Land by Lauren K. Denton

Publication: October 4, 2022 from Harper Muse Publishing

“SOUTHERN GRIT AND GRACE
HUMOR, HOPE, AND LOVE”

“For sisters Violet and Trudy, a hidden past isn’t past at all.” https://laurenkdenton.com/

The Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab

Lauren K. Denton is a Southern author whose wonderful stories of love, belonging, and finding home are set in fictional towns with characters richly drawn from her own life and imagination. In the South “your people” are the link to the past and a key to the present! Lauren’s “people” are written with deep, meaningful lives that evoke a wide range of emotions.  

A Place to Land is the story of how love and a promise to a mother impacts the lives of sisters Violet and Trudy Figg.  Violet, whose life is on hold to protect her sister, fills her days surveying birds for the Coastal Alabama Audubon Society.  Trudy, who only communicates by writing notes, silently creates artwork for their shop, Two Sisters Art in Sugar Bend, Alabama. Now the past Violet and Trudy have tried to bury bumps right into the present when after forty years a sunken boat resurfaces on the muddy, weed filled banks of the winding Little River.

Lauren K. Denton’s plot is filled with secrets and winds around as many bends as the Little River. Denton’s novel is chocked full of stories of bird watching, lost love, hurtful tales of the “friendliest guy in town’, and a teenage victim of the foster care system. With a mysterious boat, teens Maya and Tyler searching for courage to leave their present life to forge a future, and the Figg sisters hoping love transcends past decisions, readers will get a warm, safe sense of Southern belonging and what it truly means to finally find A Place to Land.

Born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, Lauren now lives with her husband and two daughters in Homewood, just outside Birmingham. In addition to her fiction, she writes a monthly newspaper column about life, faith, and how funny (and hard) it is to be a parent

Under the Southern Sky by Kristy Woodson Harvey

Release date: April 20, 2021

Kristy is a proud member of the Tall Poppy Writers, serves on the board of Beaufort Historical Association, and is a member of the University of North Carolina’s Women’s Leadership Council. She is a frequent speaker at fundraisers, book conferences and private events. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and seven-year-old son where she is working on her next novel.

The Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab

Childhood friendships, family traditions, and small-town Southern ways will capture readers’ hearts as Kristy Woodson Harvey’s lovable characters stroll onto the docks and porches of Cape Carolina. Kristy Woodson Harvey has a way of creating characters for readers to connect with through heartbreaking grief, career ending sadness, dissolving marriage embarrassment and the fear of revealing long kept family secrets. Going back to the start is the only way to ‘begin again.’

Finding joy is a quest for everyone. This is true for Amelia Paxton and Parker Thaysden, who grew up living next door to each other. Their mothers had dreamed and schemed that one day these two would marry, no matter the age difference. Readers will wonder about Greer, Parker’s first wife. She’s a business success, an author, beautiful and perfect in every way, so rather hard to like. Greer’s imperfect self comes to the surface in her daily journals along with her own secret request.  Amelia and Parker’s parents are accurately portrayed as gracious Southern ladies and gentlemen, along with their life-long feelings for neighbors and friends, “friends like family.”

The summery charm of Cape Carolina soars like a kite on the beach in the small-town elections, fishing tournaments and fish fries, along with the friendly head-to-head gossip at the elite social parties. Y’all, these festive Southern gatherings are captured “spot on” by KWH, as only a true Southern gal could do.

Secrets of each generation are kept close to the heart as this family saga snuggles readers into a “big ol’” Southern hug. Revelations and rewards come to those who wait, especially if quietly sitting on a dock Under the Southern Sky.