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

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 (March 12, 2024), link HERE 

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

Of Literature and Lattes

How do you pick up the pieces and start again in life? In this gentle romance, a newcomer and a woman, a former local, returning to a Midwestern hometown spark a romance that helps reinvent their lives.

Readers will be eager and charmed to return to Winsome, Ill., where several characters from The Printed Letter Bookshop and a host of new ones richly populate the literary landscape that Katherine Reay (The Austen Escape) presents in Of Literature and Lattes.

 

Thirty-one-year-old Alyssa Harrison left Winsome on bad terms with her overbearing mother, Janet, a bookstore employee who cheated on Alyssa's dad. For several years, Alyssa worked in Silicon Valley in California at a health-centric start-up that was ultimately deemed fraudulent by the FBI. With her career in shambles and money tight, Alyssa is forced to swallow her pride and return to her childhood home in Winsome to regroup and put the pieces of her life back together. What will it take for Alyssa and her mother, living back under the same roof, to make amends and finally bury the hatchet?

 

As Alyssa reacclimates to the quaint small town, she frequents the coffee shop and befriends the owner, Jeremy Mitchell, a Seattle transplant who overhauls the shop into a more upscale meeting place the locals resist. Jeremy enlists Alyssa's help to drum up more business and balance the books. Along the way, he battles with his ex-wife, who tries to keep him from his seven-year-old daughter.

 

A budding relationship between Alyssa and Jeremy--and their quests to overcome their respective challenges--anchors the feel-good, wholesome poignancy of the narrative. Equally appealing secondary characters and storylines bind this redemptive novel's overarching themes: the power of forgiveness, friendship and love.

 

Of Literature and Lattes: A Novel by Katherine Reay

Thomas Nelson, $16.99 Paperback, 9780785222040, 336 pages

Publication Date: March 10, 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 (May 26, 2020), link HERE

The Jesus Cow

Humorist Michael Perry (Coop) makes a foray into fiction with The Jesus Cow, a novel about a small Midwest community that is transformed in profound and hilarious ways by a bull calf born in a barn on Christmas Eve.

Perry sets the story in Swivel, Wis.--population exaggerated at 562--only visible from the interstate by a long-stemmed, halogen-lit Kwik Pump gasoline sign whose "logo glows against the sky." He focuses on resident Harley Jackson, who lives in the house where he grew up, on 15 acres of deteriorating farmland. When his prized cow, Tina Turner, delivers a bull calf bearing the image of Jesus Christ on its black-and-white patchwork hide, Harley, a born-again believer, doesn't drop to his knees. Instead, he says, "Well, that's trouble."

Whether the calf was marked by God or not, Harley doesn't want anything to disturb his manageable, unassuming life. But when the Jesus calf escapes from the barn, the animal's image goes viral. Harley's upper Midwest farm soon becomes an international spiritual destination--a circus that sends the town residents into a tizzy. 

As in Truck: A Love Story and Visiting Tom, Perry once again delivers his own brand of outlandishness through rich, endearing characterizations of quirky small-town folks, and how their zany foibles and flaws mask underlying disappointments, secrets and longings. By deploying humor in depicting the often painful truths and absurdities of life, Perry successfully makes much larger statements about society and the human condition.

The Jesus Cow: A Novel by Michael Perry

Harper, $25.99 Hardcover, 9780062289919, 304 pp

Publication Date: May 19, 2015

To order 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 (5/26/15), click HERE

This review was also featured (in a longer form) on Shelf Awareness: Book Trade (5/11/15). To read the longer review click HERE

Maddie's Choice

Newly single, native New Yorker, Maddie Taylor is a romance writer stuck in the throes of a writers' block when she receives news that Jonah Spartman, an older man she met by chance ten years before, has bequeathed her half of his cattle ranch in Arkansas. The land can be hers, but only under the condition that she stay on the ranch for a period of three months.

Eager for a change of scene, Maddie heads west, where she meets Gideon Spartman, Jonah's grumpy grandson, a man with rugged good looks, who owns the other half of the ranch. Gideon is a troubled Afghanistan military vet who struggles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). He has also become the guardian of his two, lonely orphaned nephews, Abe and Mark, whom he orders around like "hired help." Even though Gideon is initially leery and standoffish with Maddie, the two are instantly attracted to each other.

Do the secrets and scars that Gideon carries prohibit him from loving another person? And does the same hold true for Maddie and her life of isolation, lived on the pages of her romance novels?

As prideful Maddie tries to settle in to the Spartman Cattle ranch, she starts writing again, while growing closer to Abe and Mark and making friends with the townsfolk.

With yearnings suddenly awakened in Maddie for Gideon (and vice-versa), the two become fearful, suspecting that the depth of their feelings may be life-changing. But do either one of them really want their lives to change?

Zeller has written an intriguing Western-themed, contemporary love story, blending well-defined, wounded characters--from two different worlds--mired in the pull and tug of romance. Zeller also weaves in a suspenseful subplot regarding the harrowing struggles of a beef cattle farm in financial crisis.

Maddie's Choice by Joyce Zeller

Camel Press, $14.95, Paper, 9781603819596 , 274 pp

Publication Date: September 1, 2013

To order this book via AMAZON link HERE

This book has been reviewed as part of a blog tour hosted by Tribute Books. To be entered to win a $25 Amazon.com Gift Card (or PayPal cash), link HERE 

Ordinary Grace

Mystery writer William Kent Krueger has taken a break from his award-winning Cork O'Connor mystery series to give readers the gift of ORDINARY GRACE, an atmospheric novel about forty year-old Frank Drum looking back on a fateful summer that changed him and his family - as well as his perceptions of the world and people in it. 

The book details Frank's journey in the summer of 1961, when he was 13 years old and living in New Bremen, Minnesota with his traditional, "All-American" family - his father, a Christian minister; his mother a once-budding musician; his younger brother, a stutterer, who is wise and compassionate;  and his beautiful, musically gifted and much-adored older sister, headed for Julliard. In 1961, the country, and this community, was infused with faith and wholesome innocence, but death paid several visits to New Bremen during a sweltering summer via the accidental death of a teenager (was it really an accident?), the natural death of a stranger, a suicide and a murder that shatters lives and futures.

William Kent Krueger renders a thoughtful portrait of small town life and the inhabitants therein. Via strong, multi-layered characterizations, the author maps the deep-rooted values that once marked the souls of flawed, God-fearing people. Frank narrates this story from the perspective of adulthood, which lends authority to the magnitude of grief and the search for understanding when evil impacts the lives and hearts of an entire community. In the end, the themes that emerge in this moving coming-of-age story become timeless as the Drum family could be any faith-filled family--past or present--forced to confront and come to terms with the vagaries of life, guilt and dark nights of the soul.

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

Atria Books, $24.99, Hardcover, 9781451645828, 320 pp

Publication Date: March 26, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Please note: This book was provided for review by Atria Books/Simon & Schuster

Never Hug a Nun

Patrick Cantwell is a good kid, however misguided. He's a seven-year-old with a conscience, growing up in the 1960s in Webster Groves, a middle-class suburb of Saint Louis. The nuns at Mary Queen of our Hearts parochial school have done a good work in Patrick - he feels guilty about playing on the train tracks (and lying about it afterward), sneaking orange soda during lent, throwing tomatoes at buses and failing to sell enough raffle tickets for church. Swept up in a quest to help his brother get a drum set, Patrick's level of mischief escalates until he gets caught up in a robbery at the neighborhood convenience store. Amid his antics, Patrick must deal with a secret crush on schoolmate Ebby Hamilton, the impending prospect of his first confession, his 39 year-old mother being pregnant again and how pretty, young Aunt Jenny, who is "almost" a nun, is having second thoughts about her choice of vocation.

Kevin Killeen's novel breathes life and nostalgia into a bygone era. You can almost smell the pomade, see the paperback James Bond novels, S&H Greenstamps, Frank Sinatra 45 records, the family's Ford Falcon and hear the cheers for The Beatles. The story follows young Patrick's life over the course of a few months, from Easter until Christmas. The book is filled with a balanced blend of humor and poignancy, structured in short chapters that are richly woven with period details and a pitch-perfect re-creation of the  Roman Catholic Church of the 1960s (the rituals, tenets and mindsets therein) and how morality and faith were once the cornerstones of American family life.

Never Hug a Nun by Kevin Killeen

Blank Slate Press, $14.99, Trade Paper, 97809850071,  182 pp

Publication Date: December 8, 2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This book was provided for review by TLC Book Tours

We Only Know So Much

On the surface, the Copelands might appear a typical American family that lives in a small, Midwestern town. But in the hands of author Elizabeth Crane (When the Messenger is Hot) their worlds are skewed by the intrusive absurdity and cruelty of life in the novel, We Only Know So Much. Thus, the family members are challenged by things they don't understand. The mother is numb from the suicide of her secret lover. Her unaware husband, a walking Wikipedia, fears he might be losing his memory. Their daughter, an angst-ridden 19 year-old, longs for a "career" on reality TV. And their 9 year-old son is convinced he must choose between his love of crossword puzzles and girls. Add a grandfather suffering the tangled forgetfulness of Parkinson's disease and his mother, a 98 year-old matriarch whose sharp, keen mind enables her to still dream big, and what emerges is an eccentric cast of characters whose lives are rife with conflict.

Crane is an accomplished, prolific short story writer. In this, her debut novel, she makes painful issues accessible via a clever, original narrative voice that allows the reader to peek inside the head and heart of each character. By accentuating the offbeat flaws and failures of those who populate the novel, Crane reveals a dark, yet endearing sense of humanity as the individual and collective stories unwind at a descriptive, unhurried pace. In the end, the "ordinary" aspects of living life, however dysfunctional, escalate until the novel reaches thought-provoking conclusions about the meaning of life.

We Only Know So Much by Elizabeth Crane

Harper Perennial, $14.99, Trade Paper, 9780062099471,  304 pp

Publication Date: June 12, 2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Please 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 (6/22/12), click HERE.