My book club is discussing Heirlooms by Sandra Byrd this month. I would characterize this novel as women’s fiction with strong themes of family and friendship. The book shifts back and forth between two time periods, and the main characters are Helen and Eunhee and their granddaughters, Cassidy and Grace. Cassidy arrives back on Whidby Island, Washington following her grandmother’s death and is tasked with sharing long kept secrets as well as continuing her grandmother’s legacy. I really liked this book with its juxtaposition of challenges the women faced. Both storylines are compelling, and the characters are well-developed. There is a reference to a Korean saying that is translated as a taste of her hands, indicating how each woman takes the traditional and adds her own unique take. While the phrase originally relates to cooking, I loved how the author applies it to other traditions/expectations while showing how a person to forges a new path. I love this saying and have found it pertinent in many things in my own life. There is a strong faith thread that runs naturally throughout the book.
I really liked Heirlooms and heartily recommend it. You are going to want to talk about it too, so grab a reading buddy or your book club and dig in. (Note: the author has a great book club resource available on her website.)
Highly Recommended.
Audience: adults.
(I purchased this book from Amazon. All opinions expressed are mine alone.)
Answering a woman’s desperate call for help, young Navy widow Helen Devries opens her Whidbey Island home as a refuge to Choi Eunhee. As they bond over common losses and a delicate, potentially devastating secret, their friendship spans the remainder of their lives.
After losing her mother, Cassidy Quinn spent her childhood summers with her gran, Helen, at her farmhouse. Nourished by her grandmother’s love and encouragement, Cassidy discovers a passion that she hopes will bloom into a career. But after Helen passes, Cassidy learns that her home and garden have fallen into serious disrepair. Worse, a looming tax debt threatens her inheritance. Facing the loss of her legacy and in need of allies and ideas, Cassidy reaches out to Nick, her former love, despite the complicated emotions brought by having him back in her life.
Cassidy inherits not only the family home but a task, spoken with her grandmother’s final breaths: ask Grace Kim—Eunhee’s granddaughter—to help sort through the contents of the locked hope chest in the attic. As she and Grace dig into the past, they unearth their grandmothers’ long-held secret and more. Each startling revelation reshapes their understanding of their grandmothers and ultimately inspires the courage to take risks and make changes to own their lives.
Set in both modern-day and midcentury Whidbey Island, Washington, this dual-narrative story of four women—grandmothers and granddaughters—`intertwines across generations to explore the secrets we keep, the love we pass down, and the heirlooms we inherit from a well-lived life.
The author of more than fifty books, Sandra Byrd’s work has received many awards, nominations, and accolades, including a starred review, PW Pick from Publisher’s Weekly, as well as multiple starred reviews and Best Book selections from Library Journal. Other awards include the Historical Novel Society’s Editor’s Choice award, two Christy Awards nominations, a Bookpage Top Pick for Romance, and inclusion on Booklist’s Top Ten Inspirational Books of the Year list.
A dedicated foodie, Sandra cooks through the topic and location of every book she writes. In addition, she collects vintage glass and serve ware in her free time, loves long walks with her husband, and Sunday Suppers with her growing family.
Happy Tuesday! Spring has definitely arrived in central Georgia. All the pollen! I am not sure how there can be so much! LOL! But the blooming trees and shrubs, the green grass, and the warmer temps are surely welcome. Today I am sharing my Spring TBR. It’s a rather short list since I am trying to read on a whim. But I have my eye on a few to add to the list later. This list is a mix of book club, review, and just because books. I hope you can find one to add to your TBR.
I meet monthly with a group of book-loving friends who read across genres. This month we read Haven Point by Virginia Hume, a multi-generational novel set primarily in fictional Haven Point, Maine, a mostly homogeneous enclave that promises safe freedom for the children of the summer visitors. The novel has two voices — Maren, a woman who marries into the enclave and her granddaughter Skye, who has an uneasy relationship with the privileged coastal community. Annie, the very present daughter of Maren and mother of Skye, is given voice through their recollections. There are a number of issues covered — alcoholism, infidelity, mental health. There is an over-arching theme of identity and the feeling of being other inside a group. The main characters are flawed and sometimes their insights into what is occurring are inaccurate — making them not really unreliable narrators, per se, but relatable to the reader. The book spans the years of WWII to the early 2000s with great details of the eras in which the story takes place. The book is what I would characterize as a mostlyclean read as it is a general market offering.
I really enjoyed Haven Point and am looking forward to discussing it with my friends.
Recommended.
Audience: adults.
(I purchased the Kindle edition from Amazon. All opinions expressed are mine alone.)
1944: Maren Larsen is a blonde beauty from a small Minnesota farming town, determined to do her part to help the war effort––and to see the world beyond her family’s cornfields. As a cadet nurse at Walter Reed Medical Center, she’s swept off her feet by Dr. Oliver Demarest, a handsome Boston Brahmin whose family spends summers in an insular community on the rocky coast of Maine.
1970: As the nation grapples with the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, Oliver and Maren are grappling with their fiercely independent seventeen-year-old daughter, Annie, who has fallen for a young man they don’t approve of. Before the summer is over a terrible tragedy will strike the Demarests––and in the aftermath, Annie vows never to return to Haven Point.
2008: Annie’s daughter, Skye, has arrived in Maine to help scatter her mother’s ashes. Maren knows that her granddaughter inherited Annie’s view of Haven Point: despite the wild beauty and quaint customs, the regattas and clambakes and sing-alongs, she finds the place––and the people––snobbish and petty. But Maren also knows that Annie never told Skye the whole truth about what happened during that fateful summer.
Over seven decades of a changing America, through wars and storms, betrayals and reconciliations, Haven Point explores what it means to belong to a place, and to a family, which holds as tightly to its traditions as it does its secrets.
Virginia Hume is a freelance writer and editor. Her early career was spent in politics and affairs. She lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, their daughters and an under-groomed bichon named Chester.
Happy Tuesday! I was a bit stumped with today’s TTT prompt. Not that I don’t have plenty of books that I am anticipating. But I have already covered this topic in some form or fashion in the past month or so. I don’t want to bore everyone by repeating myself again and again. So I decided to look for books that are from new-to-me authors, those whose books I have yet to read for one reason or another, but that I need to read if you know what I mean! Some are upcoming releases; some have been in the book world for a little while. Some are from never before discovered authors; others from authors I know I need to read. I was astounded by the book choices that now populate my gargantuan TBR list. Help me now!
The Antiquity Affair by Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne
Two estranged sisters must band together to solve a puzzle three millennia in the making in this female-heroine take on Indiana Jones.
1907: The dawn of Egyptology is a time of imperialism and plunder, opulence and unrest, and Dr. Warren Ford, esteemed archaeologist, is the man of the hour. His daughters—prim intellectual Lila, on the eve of her debut as a Manhattan socialite, and doting nonconformist Tess, who dreams of following in his footsteps—have always lived their lives in the shadow of their famous father’s exploits. But when a secretive organization becomes intent on finding a lost artifact legendary for its dangerous power, it isn’t Dr. Ford they turn their sights on—it’s his two remarkable daughters.
Tess and Lila called themselves The Fearless Fords in their childhood, dreaming of daring international adventures together, but the sisters have barely spoken for years. Presented now with a grand adventure and a puzzle that will require all their wits, the two women face a choice. Will they follow the clues fast enough to win the ultimate prize? Or will they prove clever enough to change the game entirely?
The Antiquity Affair is a high stakes trans-Atlantic thrill ride, with the page-turning excitement and romance of classic adventure novels and a poignant story of sisterhood at its core—all the messy and beautiful truths of what it means to be family.
Bastille Day by Gregory Garrett
Veteran TV journalist Calvin Jones travels to Paris, where he negotiates love, friendship, and despair in award-winning novelist Greg Garrett’s Bastille Day.
With brilliant pacing and gorgeous prose, acclaimed novelist Greg Garrett tells the story of American TV journalist Calvin Jones, who travels to Paris to work with a producer friend he knows from their dark days covering the war in Iraq.
Cal Jones has had a quiet ten years, by design. After surviving the loss of two people he loved in the Iraq war, which he covered as a national correspondent, he fell apart and retreated to a local news job in Texas. Cal is still wrestling with those old demons when he goes to Paris to work with an old friend and encounters Nadia, a brilliant, lovely, and sad Saudi Muslim woman in Paris with plans to wed a Saudi sheikh in a family-arranged marriage.
Against his own better judgment, Cal falls for Nadia, even dragging her from the Seine when she attempts to solve her insoluble problem by taking her own life. He begins to risk a heart he thought was too badly broken to ever love again, and as the wedding ticks closer, to hope that perhaps Nadia can make a choice that includes him. Then their time rescuing each other is interrupted by the terror attack in Nice, which Cal is called out to cover. Back in that setting, Cal is thrown back into the memories of senseless violence and extremism that shattered him in Iraq—and that threaten to shatter him and his hopes now.
Garrett’s characters wrestle with the ghosts of their pasts, as they long for love, friendship, and faith in the present. Bastille Day is a gloriously-affecting novel about how our histories can damage us, but hope can heal us.
Beneath His Silence by Hannah Linder
Will Seeking Justice Lead to Her Own Demise?
A Gothic-Style Regency Romance from a Promising Young Author
Second daughter of a baron—and a little on the mischievous side—Ella Pemberton is no governess. But the pretense is a necessity if she ever wishes to get inside of Wyckhorn Manor and attain the truth. Exposing the man who killed her sister is all that matters.
Lord Sedgewick knows there’s blood on his hands. Lies have been conceived, then more lies, but the price of truth would be too great. All he has left now is his son—and his hatred. Yet as the charming governess invades his home, his safe cocoon of bitterness begins to tear away.
Could Ella, despite the lingering questions of his guilt, fall in love with such a man? Or is she falling prey to him—just as her dead sister?
Bless Your Heart, Rae Sutton by Susannah Lewis
Sometimes what your life is missing is an eccentric group of older ladies to take you under their wing?.?.?.
When Rae Sutton’s mama passes away and leaves her the house where she grew up, Rae can’t imagine how the little old place might restore her broken life. Mourning the recent loss of her marriage, she takes the house and settles back into her tiny hometown with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Molly Margaret, and their overweight dog.
There she’s embraced by her mother’s close-knit circle of friends, the Third Thursday ladies. Though almost half their age and far less confident of positive outcomes, Rae joins their ministry-slash-book-club-slash-gossip circle and allows the women to speak wry honesty and witty humor into her tired heart. As a new career and a new romance bring their own complications, Rae relies on the unlikely family she’s found and begins to wonder if her future holds more hope than she ever could have imagined.
The Call of The Wrens by Jenni L. Walsh
The Call of the Wrens introduces the little-known story of the daring women who rode through war-torn Europe carrying secrets on their shoulders.
An orphan who spent her youth without a true home, Marion Hoxton found in the Great War something other than destruction. She discovered a chance to belong. As a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service—the Wrens—Marion gained sisters. She found purpose in her work as a motorcycle dispatch rider assigned to train and deliver carrier pigeons to the front line. And despite the constant threat of danger, she and her childhood friend Eddie began to dream of a future together. Until the battle that changed everything.
Now twenty years later, another war has broken out across Europe, calling Marion to return to the fight. Meanwhile others, like twenty-year-old society girl Evelyn Fairchild, hear the call for the first time. For Evelyn, serving in the war is a way to prove herself after a childhood fraught with surgeries and limitations from a disability. The re-formation of the Wrens as World War II rages is the perfect opportunity to make a difference in the world at seventy miles per hour.
Told in alternating narratives that converge in a single life-changing moment, The Call of the Wrens is a vivid, emotional saga of love, secrets, and resilience—and the knowledge that the future will always belong to the brave souls who fight for it.
A Cry in The Dark by Jessica Patch
Deep in the Kentucky hills, three women have been found brutalized and murdered. But the folks in Night Holler have their own ways and their own laws. And they’re not talking…
Led to an isolated Appalachian Mountain town by a trail of disturbing murders, FBI special agent Violet Rainwater’s determined to catch a serial killer with a twisted agenda. With locals refusing to reveal their secrets, Violet’s only ally is Detective John Orlando. But even John has an ulterior motive—he’s convinced this case is connected to his wife’s murder.
As they dig deeper, Violet uncovers a link to her own unresolved past. For years she’s worked the cold case of her mother’s abduction, which had led to her birth. The need to look into the eyes of the sinful man who fathered her consumes Violet. Until she can, she’ll never have peace. Because she’s terrified she might be exactly like him.
In this chilling novel, when the present collides with Violet’s mysterious past and John’s tragic loss, they must unravel the warped, sinuous connections before the killer strikes again. But solving the case might not be nearly as terrifying as the possibility that Violet’s finally found her roots…
Hardly Any Shooting Stars Left by B. K. Froman
A captivating tale of humor and mystery by an award-winning author.
After her father’s death, a creative, free-spirited young woman plans to leave her Oregon ranch and hometown of busybodies. But she didn’t count on a corpse in her shop—or murder. Forced to create friendships with strange, crabby, or too-helpful neighbors, she must face a murder charge and confront aching childhood memories in a town and a life stuck in the past.
Lexi DePriest has always been a loner with a sharp wit and lack of concern about fitting in. If she could quickly sell the family ranch—her father’s life’s work—she’d get out of the Oregon valley, but life has never been easy.
When her crackpot neighbor shoots the drone she uses to check fences and cattle, a battle begins. Nosy eyes in the tiny community are watching, some malevolent—and dangerously nearby.
With no explanation,a man is found murdered in her shop, and the trust she’s built in herself and with a few townsfolk unravels. It takes a crabby school secretary and a Scottish welder to secretly examine murder suspects. The investigation gives her a rare choice to fit in to the home where she’s always lived—but will she choose community, family, or herself?
Indigo Isle by T. I. Lowe
“Storms show up and there ain’t a thing we can do to stop them.”
Sonny Bates left South Carolina fifteen years ago and never looked back. Now she’s a successful Hollywood location scout who travels the world, finding perfect places for movie shoots. Home is wherever she lands, and between her busy schedule and dealing with her boss’s demands, she has little time to think about the past . . . until her latest gig lands her a stone’s throw from everything she left behind.
Searching off the coast of Charleston for a secluded site to film a key scene, Sonny wanders onto a private barrier island and encounters its reclusive owner, known by locals as the Monster of Indigo Isle. What she finds is a man much more complex than the myth.
Once a successful New York attorney, Hudson Renfrow’s grief has exiled him to his island for several years. He spends his days alone, tending his fields of indigo, then making indigo dye―and he has no interest in serving the intrusive needs of a film company or yielding to Sonny’s determined curiosity. But when a hurricane makes landfall on the Carolina coast, stranding them together, an unlikely friendship forms between the two damaged souls. Soon the gruff exterior Hudson has long hidden behind crumbles―exposing the tender part of him that’s desperate for forgiveness and a second chance.
A story of hanging on and letting go, of redemption and reconciliation, and of a love that heals the deepest wounds, from the author of the breakout Southern fiction bestseller Under the Magnolias.
The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell by Kelly Flanagan
Elijah Campbell is on the verge of losing his writing career, his faith, and his marriage when a recurring childhood nightmare drives him back to his hometown, Bradford’s Ferry. There, his encounters with loved ones both past and present shed light on the reason his wife left him—and the meaning of his nightmare. However, beyond the light he begins to glimpse something even more terrifying—a decision he must make either to continue hiding the secrets of his past or unhide the only thing that can save his marriage: himself.
In psychologist Kelly Flanagan’s nonfiction works (Loveable, True Companions), he drew from clinical insight to explore the spiritual depths of identity and relationships. Now, in this debut novel, he weaves a compelling and plot-twisting tale that brings new life to those insights, along with fresh revelations about personal growth, spiritual transformation, and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships.
Many of the books I review are provided to me free of charge from publishers, authors, or other groups in return for a review. The opinions expressed in the reviews are mine and mine alone. No monetary consideration is given. This disclaimer is in accordance with FTC rules.
I am an Amazon.com affiliate, which means that I earn a small percentage of the sales from products purchased through links on my site. I NEVER recommend a book in order to receive a profit. Proceeds from affiliate sales help to defray operating costs of the blog.
Giveaways are open to persons 18 years or older. All winners are picked randomly. No purchases are necessary to enter a giveaway. All giveaways are for US entries only and are void where prohibited.
GDPR compliance -- the email address you leave when you subscribe to the blog or leave a comment, is used only to notify winners of giveaways or to send an email whenever a post goes live. That's it.
For a more detailed privacy policy for Wordpress sites, go to https://wordpress.org/about/privacy/.
Recent Comments