The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County

A tenderly drawn, multi-generational novel about the bonds of family, food, faith, and the rallying sustenance of small-town communities.

 

In The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County, Claire Swinarski debuts her first adult novel, a poignantly refreshing story centered on the bonds of family, food, faith, and small-town communities.

 

At the helm is Esther Larson, a warm, 82-year-old, Wisconsin widow—a mother and grandmother. Esther and a group of local women, ‘The Funeral Ladies,’ have shared a bond for decades, providing luncheons for the bereaved in the basement of St. Anne’s Catholic Church. When the ‘funeral ladies’ learn that Esther’s been conned out of $30,000, they--along with Esther’s family--devise a plan to write a local cookbook. Can they raise enough funds to save Esther’s home?

 

Along the way, a pie Esther serves at a funeral arranged by celebrity chef, Ivan Welsh-- his wife dies in a tragic car accident--wows him enough to take notice. After Ivan and his Chicago-based adult stepson, Cooper, and Cricket, the 13-year-old daughter Ivan shared with his deceased wife, visit the town for the burial services, they decide to stay on. They rent an Airbnb from Esther’s adult granddaughter, Iris, who falls romantically for Cooper, a former paramedic who now works “flipping pancakes” at the local diner. Cooper harbors a secret that impinges upon his life—might it affect Irises’ life, as well?

 

Serious themes--underscored by tenets of love, acceptance, and forgiveness--are compassionately threaded through Swinarski’s (What Happened to Rachel Riley?) tenderly drawn story that will hold multi-generational appeal.

 

The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County by Claire Swinarski

Avon Books (Harper Collins), $30.00 hardcover, 9780063319875, 272 pages

Publishing Date: March 12, 2024

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NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (March 12, 2024), link HERE 

The Threat

A clever dark comedy about an unassuming New Yorker whose dull, stunted life takes wildly hilarious turns after he receives a death threat. 

Nathaniel Stein, writer for the New Yorker, dishes up an inventively absurdist, dark comedy about an unassuming middle-aged man whose life goes farcically off the rails in The Threat.

 

Melvin Levin is a single, conscientious, rule-following, 41-year-old with a bad back. He lives alone in a New York City apartment, and his social circle consists largely of bestowing good deeds upon an elderly neighbor. One night while Melvin is anticipating a promotion at his totally nondescript job, the boring, dull routine of his life is suddenly overturned when he receives a “plain little note” in the mail: “Mr. Melvin Levin, I’m going to kill you,” the note begins. “You’ve worn out my patients for the last time and your through…” The unelaborate note, complete with poor grammar, becomes like a “flag planted atop the mountain of bad luck” that was Melvin’s life. The threat produces a ferocious sense of anxiety in Melvin, who--having lived with “unerring politeness” and an “unceasing, almost superstitious rectitude, taking great pains to avoid rubbing people the wrong way”--struggles to decipher whom he might’ve wronged. Despite the chilling implications of the note, Melvin ultimately becomes empowered and excited by the idea of having an anonymous, formidable enemy, and he undergoes a hilarious life transformation.

 

Stein’s smart, clever first novel will charm readers with a simple premise that snowballs into a side-splitting, thought-provoking meditation about how one man’s seemingly inconsequential life finally overflows with grandiose meaning when faced with the prospect of death.

The Threat by Nathaniel Stein
Keylight Books (Turner Publishing), $27.99 hardcover, 9781684429691, 192 pages
Publishing Date: January 16, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (February 2, 2024), link HERE 

 

142 Ostriches

Familial dynamics are complicated and messy--even more so when there is a death in the family.

A deeply moving story about a young woman who inherits an ostrich ranch and must fight family strife and dysfunction.

April Dávila's first novel is wise, moving and beautifully rendered. She sets 142 Ostriches on Wishbone Ranch, an ostrich farm in Sombra, a remote California town entrenched in the Mojave Desert.

The heroine, 24-year-old Tallulah Jones, is ready to fly the coop to take a Forest Service job in Montana when her Grandma Helen dies in a mysterious car crash. She is the person who rescued 13-year-old Tallulah from her irresponsible, alcoholic mother in Oakland, Calif., and brought her to live on the ostrich ranch 11 years ago. The news derails and defers Tallulah's plans. All along, Helen had groomed Tallulah to take over the 50-year-old ranch. She was adamantly opposed to her granddaughter's plans to escape to Montana. This leaves Tallulah to question the timing of her grandmother's death: Was it really an accident?

Helen's absence reunites and unsettles the extended family. This includes Tallulah's estranged mother, Laura; aunt Christine, a level-headed wife and mother who lives nearby; and erratic recovering meth-addict uncle Steve. When everyone learns that Helen has bequeathed the ostrich farm to Tallulah, emotions and rebelliousness run high in the family--and in the ostrich flock, when the sensitive birds suddenly stop laying eggs. Contentiousness further escalates when Tallulah considers selling the farm.

She is a young woman faced with difficult choices in her quest to rise above the perils of familial dysfunction. The result, Dávila's stellar debut, is infused with richly drawn characters, tightly focused suspense and authentic detail about farm and desert life.

142 Ostriches by April Dávila

Kensington Books, $15.95 Paperback

9781496724700, 272 pages

Publication Date: February 25, 2020

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (March 24, 2020), link HERE

Late in the Day

A moving, multifaceted novel explores how a sudden death changes the lives of two British couples and their children.

More than 30 years of love and friendship--and the loyalty and betrayals therein--are central to Late in the Day, a psychologically astute novel by Tessa Hadley. The story launches with a death that disrupts the lives of two British couples bonded inextricably since their college years.

Zachary Samuels, one of the four, dies suddenly from a heart incident. The death of this middle-aged gallery owner overwhelms his needy, helpless wife, Lydia. And this tragic news also shocks the lives of Lydia and Zachary's closest friends: Christine, an artist who had many showings at Zach's gallery, and her husband, Alexandr, a poet who gave up his writing dreams to become headmaster at a progressive primary school.

Zach is absent throughout the narrative, but his presence looms large in these three lives--and those of the offspring of each respective couple. In Zach's wake, roads not taken are reconsidered, affections shift and old wounds and jealousies are resurrected. This all leads to responses and actions that ultimately upend these once seemingly settled lives.  

As in her other work, Hadley (The Past) has a firm grasp on the complexity of grief and the strengths and foibles of human nature. This exquisitely rendered, character-driven novel probes emotional depths of an ensemble cast of ordinary people who are forced to come to grips with the meaning of life through loss and death.

Latein the Day: A Novel by Tessa Hadley

Harper, $26.99, Hardcover, 97800062476692, 288 pages

Publication Date: January 15, 2019

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NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (January 15, 2019), link HERE

Grief Cottage

An orphaned 11 year-old works through his grief when he goes to live with his great-aunt on a remote South Carolina island.

Marcus Harshaw looks back on his life as an 11 year-old who faced the tragic, sudden death of his single mother and then went to live with his great-aunt Charlotte on a remote South Carolina island. The story is predominantly set during Marcus's first summer on the island when Aunt Charlotte--a thrice married and divorced, set-in-her-ways, reclusive artist--took in precocious, self-contained Marcus and provided him a safe haven. Marcus's formative years with his mother--and their chronic struggles to make ends meet--made Marcus philosophically wise beyond his years, enabling him to adapt and be sensitive toward his aunt's brooding, hermetic life. Charlotte gained notoriety painting images of a deserted, dilapidated local house nicknamed, Grief Cottage, where the family who occupied the residence disappeared during Hurricane Hazel in 1954. The battered, run-down cottage becomes a source of intrigue for Marcus, as well, as he seeks to learn more about the shack's history and the people who perished there. This quest unearths questions about Marcus's own background, namely coming to grips with his relationship with his mother, how he lost his best friend from school and identifying his unknown, absent father.

Godwin (Publishing: A Writer's Memoir) has written an exquisitely rendered narrative that emotionally deepens with metaphorical subplots that include the preservation of nested Loggerhead turtle eggs and the presence of a ghost at Grief Cottage. This grace-filled story probes aspects of life and death, isolation and family, and how great pain and loss can ultimately lead to unforeseen transcendence. 

Grief Cottage: A Novel by Gail Godwin

Bloomsbury USA, $27.00 Hardcover, 9781632867049

Publication Date: June 6, 2017

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NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 11, 2017), link HERE

Once We Were Sisters

A beautifully written memoir maps a woman's search for the truth about her beloved sister's life--and her mysterious death.

Novelist Sheila Kohler's first book of nonfiction, Once We Were Sisters, is an achingly beautiful memoir. The story probes Kohler's relationship with her sister, Maxine--two years older--and the bond they shared in life and in death. When Maxine was 39 years old, the devoted wife and mother of six was killed in a mysterious car crash that Kohler strongly believes was intentional. The driver of the car was Maxine's abusive husband--a successful and renowned heart surgeon with a relentless dark side. He survived the crash. 

Telling the story more than 35 years later, Kohler (The Bay of Foxes) seeks to find answers, identify the forces that precipitated Maxine's death and untangle her sister's life from her own. Despite their contrasting personalities, the two were close during a privileged upbringing in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. They studied at exclusive boarding schools and later traveled abroad together. The death of their father in their youth, and a mother who frequently departed into her own alcohol-infused world, marked their lives, and both sisters married philandering husbands.

Kohler's search for literal and emotional truths, her abiding love for her sister--along with guilt and regret--propel this succinct narrative. Maxine's shattering death has deeply permeated and haunted every aspect of Kohler's life, especially her writing. Thankfully, the years have finally granted this gifted fiction writer the perspective and liberation to share her own story. 

Once We Were Sisters: A Memoir by Sheila Kohler

Penguin, $16.00 Paper, 9780143129295, 256 pages

Publication Date: January 17, 2017

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NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (February 7, 2017), link HERE 

The Love She Left Behind

 
A dead woman is the central character of The Love She Left Behind by British author Amanda Coe (What They Do in the Dark). The deceased is Sara, who, 35 years before her death from stomach cancer, deserted her husband and children--Nigel, then age 13, and Louise, age 10--and gave up everything to live with Patrick, a playwright for whom she was muse. Patrick never had any fondness for his stepchildren. After Sara uprooted her life for him, he paid for Nigel to attend boarding school and Louise was shipped off to live with an aunt after their birth father remarried and rejected them.

The book opens in Cornwall, in the now-dilapidated house Sara and Patrick shared. Nigel--a married, type-A lawyer and father--has little care or respect for Louise, a divorced, overweight, working-class mother of two rebellious teenagers over whom she has little control. They are faced with Patrick's irritability, drunkenness and writer's block. As the three go over details and assimilate the contents of Sara's will, it is revealed that the couple's house and the dramatic rights to Bloody Empire--a popular play Patrick wrote in the 1980s--were put in Sara's name for tax purposes. Patrick battles Nigel and Louise over the transfer of ownership, and brother and sister also lock horns.

Coe employs dark comedy to piece together and acutely observe emotional issues dealing with abandonment, loss, death and grief. The idea that we do not truly know the ones we love serves to solidify the cracked fault lines in the foundation of this thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking family saga.

The Love She Left Behind by Amanda Coe
W.W. Norton, $25.95 Hardcover, 978039324543, 256 pp
Publication Date: July 15, 2015
To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (7/14/15), click HERE

The Removers

In 1990, when Andrew Meredith was 14 years-old, his family fell apart. The downfall was caused by his 50 year-old father, a teacher fired from La Salle College in Pennsylvania after he was accused of sexual misconduct with a female student. The scandal and its lasting impact on the lives of his mother, sister and himself bind this powerfully drawn, often wrenching debut memoir, The Removers. The story of Meredith's experiences working alongside his father, who later found work as a "remover," taking away the bodies of people who died in their own homes, becomes the central thread and metaphor for the dissolution of his family.

A remover is someone who is "paid to be invisible . . . We are men made to be forgotten." Fortunately for the reader, however, Meredith never forgets incidents from an 18-year period in his life, which vividly recall details from his often gruesome, sometimes exhilarating, experiences in handling corpses while grappling with his bitterness toward a father who broke his heart.

Meredith's fluid, unabashed prose is delivered in a stream-of-consciousness style interspersed with scenes of how he floundered for fifteen years after high school. He worked a job he didn't want, taking ten years to finish college, and endured a series of failed romantic relationships. After ultimately moving to California, Meredith missed his hometown—the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia. Might his work with the dead have been his true professional calling, his salvation? Meredith's circuitous journey of self-discovery, his trying to reconcile his life by working with the dead, will fascinate those interested in the mysteries of life and death.

The Removers: A Memoir  by Andrew Meredith

Scribner, 24.00 Hardcover, 9781476761213, 179 pp

Publication Date: July 15, 2014

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Readers (7/25/14), click HERE

How to Survive Life (and Death)

It's one thing to have a Near-Death Experience (or NDE, for short), but to have three?  Could it be that fate shepherded Emmy nominated art director and author Robert Kopecky away from three potential near-death catastrophes in order to finally convince him to commit his experiences to the page and share what he's learned with others?

Kopecky never planned on personally investigating the nature of death and how to live a more fulfilling life. But in his entertaining memoir and self-help book, How to Survive Life (and Death): A Guide for Happiness in This World and Beyond, he delivers his insightful and inspiring personal story, which puts mortality into perspective while offering strategies to improve and experience life to the fullest. Crafted in simple, accessible prose, and filled with lots of good humor, the author intersperses details of each of his NDEs, which occurred via various culprits in three distinct generations of his life. The author's disembodiment experiences—and each aftermath—taught him valuable life lessons that ultimately enlightened him about the nature of time, how to face fear and suffering, why "radical kindness" and compassion, along with forging a spirit of generosity and forgiveness, are essential to keeping faith and hope alive.

Kopecky ties cosmology, metaphysics and quantum reality together with his own spiritual experiences, while also weaving in theories from Buddhism, Hinduism, the teachings of Gandhi, excerpts from the apocryphal Gospels of Thomas and the more contemporary views of Joseph Campbell. In the end, Kopecky's miraculous passages back from the brink of death make for a compelling narrative—for believers, nonbelievers and garden-variety skeptics. He demonstrates how love and surrender are liberating, healing powers that can ultimately bring us "out of this world"—and sometimes back again, too!

 
How To Survive Life (and Death): A Guide for Happiness in This World and Beyond by Robert Kopecky

Conari Press,  $16.95 paper, 97801573246361, 224 pp

Publication Date: April 1, 2014

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

The Lemon Orchard

Some losses we never get over. And when a parent loses a child, grief becomes all the more profound. In The Lemon Orchard, prolific author Luanne Rice explores this experience with creative compassion telling the story of Julia Hughes, a mother whose 16 year-old daughter, Jenny, dies in a car crash that also claims the life of Jenny's father and Julia's husband, a man whom she was in the process of divorcing.

Five years after the deaths, Julia, a professor of cultural anthropology at Yale University, is still unable to shake the loss. But when a beloved aunt and uncle ask her to house-sit for their Malibu property and lemon orchard, Julia packs up with her beloved dog and heads west. 

The natural, sensory beauty of the Santa Monica Mountains serves to intensify Julia's memories of Jenny and stir her presence. And when Roberto, the manager of the lemon orchard takes an interest in Julia--and vice-versa--the two, from different cultures, connect and bond through their shared pain of losing daughters. In Roberto's case, his daughter was lost and never found during their illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States. Julia and Roberto begin to fall in love, which inspires a renewed sense of purpose in Julia as she becomes determined to find answers about Roberto's daughter.

Alternating points of view lend intimacy to the romantic elements and suspense of the narrative. Rice has written a tender portrait of grief and loss that ultimately becomes a gateway to hope and healing, love and reinvention.

The Lemon Orchard by Luanne Rice

Pamela Dorman Books,  $27.95, Hardcover, 9780670025275 , 304 pp

Publication Date: July 2, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (7/12/13), click HERE