A Wish for Winter

An enchanting, fun romance about a single, 40-year-old bookstore owner in search of finding her Mr. Right—a nameless man in a Santa suit.

Viola Shipman (pen name of Wade Rouse) delights readers with A Wish for Winter, an unforgettable, heartwarming story about a never-married bookstore owner from Petoskey, Mich. who goes in search of rekindling Christmas joy and finding true love.

 

Christmas was always special for Susan Norcross. Both her mother and her grandmother met their future husbands when they were dressed up as Santa Claus. But when Susan was in fifth grade, her parents were killed in a Christmastime car crash that snuffed out hope from the holidays.

 

Susan is “girlishly youthful looking” and now the successful owner of “Sleigh By the Bay,” a thriving community bookstore. As she nears her 40^th birthday, those who love her--especially the grandparents who raised her, a dear friend of her late mother’s and Holly, Susan’s best friend--want her to settle down. When Susan dresses up like Mrs. Claus and attends the famed “10k Santa Run” in Chicago, she meets an appealing Kris Kringle who sparks her fancy. The two make plans to meet up after the race. However, Susan is later stood up—and she never got Santa’s name. This disappointment encourages determined friend Holly to take to social media to find him. Three men--three Kris Kringles from the run--step up claiming to be the ‘mystery’ Santa. Might one of them be Susan’s romantic destiny?

 

Shipman’s (The Charm Bracelet; The Recipe Box; The Secret of Snow) sensitive storytelling is enlivened by offbeat, well-meaning characters and an enchantingly fun, romantic plot.

A Wish for Winter by Viola Shipman

Graydon House (Harper Collins), $17.99 paperback, 9781525804847, 416 pages

Publishing Date: November 15, 2022

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

Cat Brushing

Deeply resonant, eloquently rendered short stories about women who change and grow with enlightenment amidst the twilight of their lives.

Octogenarian Jane Campbell may be “new” to the publishing industry, but her first book, Cat Brushing, is refreshingly accomplished. The thirteen exquisitely drawn short stories in the collection are woven with wit and bold enlightenment. Each meticulously crafted gem focuses on the lives of aging women who grapple with their shrinking places in the world while coming to terms with feelings and failings, choices and losses.

 

Longing, need and sensuality surprise: A woman who “never put a foot over the line,” lives out her days in a care facility. Having grown distant from her self-interested adult children, the woman experiences an unexpected awakening amidst the gentle touch of her attentive manicurist. A similar theme infuses the tender story of one writerly woman’s life and a sense of loneliness that persists throughout marriages, affairs and motherhood. When she settles alone in a small village later ravaged by a violent storm, she takes in a displaced neighbor whose house is destroyed. The two disparate souls form a bond deeper than either could have imagined.

 

Reflective pleasures abound in the title story, where a woman “judged too old to live alone,” moves in with her son and his younger wife. Feeling “dispossessed… of control and elegance,” the woman and her Siamese cat become fellow inmates. The cat arouses charms and wiles the woman once had in abundance—maybe all is not lost?

 

Many stories deal with women forced to give up rights, respect and desires: An older woman takes a fall that sets in motion a series of events that drag her back to the past and a questionable issue of adoption. A simple lunch resurrects a memory of parental love that suddenly transforms, through the prism of retrospect, into control. A chance meeting on a train depicts the effect of consequential choices. Revenge tastes sweet when an unassuming neighbor privy to a long-suffering, powerless wife and her ogre husband cleverly settles a score.

Aspects of regret, mourning, fantasies, and lost love infuse these eloquently rendered, skillfully plotted stories that pack a wallop. “Ageing is often represented as an accumulation, of disease, of discomforts, of wrinkles,” says the narrator of the title story. However, in these wholly original, late-in-life stories crafted by Jane Campbell, the limitations incurred by aging ultimately become surprising sources of wisdom and empowered liberation.

 

Cat Brushing by Jane Campbell

Grove Press/Grove Atlantic, $26.00 hardcover, 256 pages, 9780802160027

Publication Date: August 9, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND link HERE

 

NOTE: To read this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (June 20, 2022 ), link HERE

 

NOTE: To read a condensed version of this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (August 12, 2022), link HERE