Must Love Flowers

A gentle, heartfelt story about a grieving widow--and those suffering similarly in her orbit--who gets her life back on track.

Starting over is the central theme of Must Love Flowers, a tender, graceful novel written by Debbie Macomber. 

 

Joan Sample of Seattle, Wash., is a 54-year-old mother of two adult sons who has been widowed for four years. Since her husband’s passing, she’s become paralyzed by grief. Even her flower garden, once her pride and joy, has become grossly overgrown. When the town sends a condemning notice about the state of her property, she is finally propelled out of her emotional malaise. She joins a grief support group and sets out in search of hiring a landscaper “who must love flowers.” She enlists Phil Harrison—a quiet, private local. When she later crosses paths with Phil at the support group, she learns that he, too, is burdened by grief and loss of his own. As Joan’s broken heart begins to heal, she decides, on a lark, to take in a border, Maggie Herbert, a hard-working college student who longs to escape her abusive, alcoholic father. Thus begins a journey of second chances for each of these lost, wounded, and struggling souls. As they forge ahead in rebuilding their lives, friendship and romance find each of them along the way. 

 

Examining the gentle nuances of multi-generational smalltown life is what Macomber (The Best Is Yet to Come, It’s Better This Way) does best. In Must Love Flowers, Macomber’s heartfelt storytelling is on full display, showing how hope can rebloom when cultivated with kindness, caring, and love.

 

Must Love Flowers by Debbie Macomber

Ballantine Books, $28.00 hardcover, 9780593600559, 336 pages

Publishing Date: July 11, 2023

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 on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 14, 2023), link HERE

The Five-Star Weekend

A juicy story about a widowed food blogger who invites four women from different eras of her life to a Nantucket weekend getaway.

Elin Hilderbrand’s storytelling is in top form with The Five-Star Weekend, an intricately plotted, juicy novel about a popular, internet food blogger who hosts a girls’ weekend of food, fun, and togetherness.

 

After Hollis Shaw’s husband of 23-years dies in a car crash, the affable food blogging sensation tries to stabilize her life by inviting four women from different phases of her life to her picturesque home in Nantucket. The guests includes Tatum McKenzie, a local islander; Hollis’s friend since they were teenagers. Dru-Ann Jones, Hollis’s college roommate, who is now a premiere sports’ agent for professional female athletes. Brooke Kirtley, a friend from the prime of Hollis’s life—a woman instrumental in helping Hollis through the profundity of her grief. And Gigi Ling, a pilot from Atlanta, Georgia, whom Hollis has never met—the two have become online friends via Hollis’s blog. Hollis also invites her rebellious daughter, Caroline, with whom she shares a contentious relationship—one she’d really like to heal. As a film student at NYU, Hollis pays Caroline to attend the weekend, encouraging her daughter to film the event.

 

Hilderbrand (The Hotel Nantucket) delivers a five-star read that beautifully traces the essence of contemporary women and the complexities of their lives. Readers will be fascinated by the surprising drama of bringing--and braiding--together such disparate personalities. In the end, it’s not just Hollis at a crossroads. Each woman faces trials, challenges, and changes in which readers will identify and be eager to invest in.

 

The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand

Little, Brown and Company, $30.00 hardcover, 9780316258777, 384 pages, Publishing Date: June 13, 2023

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 on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (June 16, 2023), link HERE

The Wedding Ranch

A tender, thoughtful romance about two lost souls who find each other and are forced to confront the past in order to embrace true love.

Love, loss, second chances and small-town living are hallmarks of Nancy Naigle’s fiction. In The Wedding Ranch, prolonged grief is added to the mix producing a tenderly drawn romance about two strangers, both coping with heartbreak, who are very leery about love.

 

Just when it appears as though Lorri Walker and her husband have turned the corner--after he’d gone astray in their marriage--he suddenly leaves her for another woman. Lorri uproots herself and a giant Mastiff dog--a present from her ex--from their home in Raleigh, N.C. and moves a few hours away to Mill Creek Highlands, a quaint small town, where she believes she can make a fresh start and grow her graphic design business. There, she meets rancher, Ryder Bolt, a grief-stricken widower who, after seven years, is still struggling with the tragic loss of his wife and son. Tending to the demands of his family’s sprawling property and proudly assisting his niece and nephew as they expand the reach of The Wedding Ranch--a popular venue for authentic farm weddings--keeps him very busy.

 When Lorri and Ryder cross paths, a good-natured friendship begins to develop. But will their respective dark pasts drive a wedge between them? And are they willing to risk their troubled, wounded hearts for something more?

 

Naigle (The Shell Collector) is a sensible, compassionate storyteller who once again demonstrates a keen understanding for--and deep sensitivity toward--the complexities of true romance and the healing power of forgiveness and love.

 

 

The Wedding Ranch by Nancy Naigle

St. Martin’s Griffin, $16.99 paperback, 352 pages, 9781250794130

Publishing Date: December 6, 2022

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 (January 13, 2023), link HERE

You Have Reached Your Destination

A stellar collection of literary short stories tracing the lives of twelve women who grapple with tests of their character and the meaning of life.

Louise Marburg truly understands people and the human condition. Her prize-winning collections of literary short stories, The Truth About Me and No Diving Allowed, offer deeply perceptive, telling stories of ordinary people, good people, who face tests in life (challenges often thrust upon them), forcing them to navigate complex emotional landscapes.

Building on her strengths, she continues to travel a similar path in You Have Reached Your Destination, a stellar collection of twelve short stories that won the 2021 EastOver Prize for Fiction.  

Marburg mines the lives of women protagonists of various ages who face myriad dilemmas that elicit unexpected twists, turns and life detours: In “Alouette,” a 32-year-old woman faces the travails of conceiving a child she’s not even sure she wants—counseled by modern medicine and a psychic. In “The Weather of Menopause,” a female artist--affected by the angst of middle-aged--becomes riddled with insecurity that totally exasperates those around her. Family hierarchies take center stage in “Even-Steven,” where an adult stepdaughter tries to help reconcile the life of her terminally ill, 59-year-old step-mother—the two resent, but also like each other. The story, “June,” centers on an apparently thriving 91-year-old widow and mother. When a young couple moves into her apartment building, right next door, the contentiousness of the couples’ relationship brings back feelings from June’s past and forces her to question herself. What could have been and what actually is collide in “Dance, Rockette,” where a dinner party points up disappointments in how life turned out for a married couple with young children: the husband longs to return to his former glory days, while the wife invents an exciting (hilariously fictitious) past for herself. In “Double Happiness,” a happy accident reroutes a rather disoriented young woman who had fallen for a new love on Tinder… until she meets another man at a party—one who might or might not be who and all he claims to be. And in the title story, “You Have Reached Your Destination,” a single woman from New York City is summoned to Baltimore to be with her older brother after he suffers a debilitating heart attack. A judgmental, rebellious niece and a visit to the home where she once grew up suddenly reframes the past amidst the chilling reality of the present.

Marburg’s concise, wry storytelling is first-rate. Each protagonist experiences a controlled chaos of loss and grief that is buoyed by Marburg’s unique brand of levity--levity that illuminates absurdities of the human condition on the road to enlightenment.

You Have Reached Your Destination (Short Stories) by Louise Marburg

EastOver Press, $20.00 paperback, 9781958094006, 168 pages

Publication Date: November 10, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

Click HERE to read my interview with Louise Marburg

The Hotel Nantucket

A compelling, juicy romantic drama about patrons and staff embroiled in the relaunch of a storied old hotel in Nantucket, Cape Cod.  

In The Hotel Nantucket, Elin Hilderbrand (Golden Girl; 28 Summers) brings readers an exciting, multi-plotted, genre-bending drama set in a storied old hotel on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts that's been spruced up and is ready to make a glorious comeback. The large-scale renovation of the once-derelict hotel, which had its heyday in the 1920s, is financially backed by a billionaire developer in London. He spares no expense and aims to put the hotel on the map as a top vacation destination.

The developer lures Lizbet Keaton, who just ended a long-term romantic relationship, away from her job at a competitor. Her job is to hire local staff to transform the old hotel into a first-class operation offering the finest in hospitality--a sterling spa and a celebrity-crewed kitchen and bar. What sets the hotel apart is its history, namely its resident ghost, a former chambermaid. Funny and often judgmental, she served at the hotel during the Roaring '20s and met a tragic death that's kept her spirit active on the premises.

While the hotel strives to regain its former glory, a large cast of characters--hotel staff and patrons--juggle romantic entanglements while unraveling mysteries and secrets in their own lives. Plotlines about scandalous affairs, extortion, assault and sordid pasts enliven Hilderbrand's obvious appreciation for the ins and outs of the hotel industry and for Nantucket culture. Readers in search of page-turning escapist fiction will be immensely intrigued by checking into The Hotel Nantucket and checking out all it has to offer. 

The Hotel Nantucket: A Novel by Elin Hilderbrand

Little, Brown and Company, $29.00 hardcover, 9780316258678, 416 pages

Publication Date: June 14, 2022

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 (June 17, 2022), link HERE

The Year of the Horses

An honest, resolute memoir that details how a writer suffering an existential crisis found healing and salvation in her passion for horses.

Novelist and writing guru Courtney Maum takes readers on a candid, deeply moving journey that details how she found her way out of a labyrinth of depression by rekindling her passion for horses. 

By her 35th birthday, Maum (Before and After the Book Deal; Costalegre) was a successful novelist, working on her second book. She was at her happiest--a beloved wife and doting mother of a beautiful baby girl, Nina. She and her equally creative filmmaker husband had moved from Brooklyn, N.Y., into a fixer-upper house they bought in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. But when Nina turned two, something indefinable manifested in Maum--an existential crisis. Maum was deluged with roiling feelings that stalled her writing, plagued her with insomnia and provoked a general feeling of emotional malaise. A non-life-threatening car crash sustained with her husband and daughter "was a match to the depression" that would all-out engulf her. However, the accident proved a necessary jolt that sent Maum on a journey to reassess her life and decipher what might bring her a sense of peace and joy, and restore her equilibrium.

In therapy, Maum mined her past, recognizing how she missed her affinity and fascination for horses, starting when she was a child with a pony, boarded in a barn near her family's Greenwich, Conn., home. Maum's journey of healing and salvation in reconnecting to equine culture is wittily engaging and uncompromisingly forthright. She confronts the past, while also braiding in delightful flourishes regarding the metaphorical meanings of horses and the universal role they have played throughout history and in the arts.

 The Year of the Horses: A Memoir by Courtney Maum

Tin House Books, $27.95 hardcover, 9781953534156, 416 pages

Publication Date: April 19, 2022

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 3, 2022), link HERE

 

To read the longer form of this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (March 22, 2022), link HERE