Summer of Love

A deeply engrossing, fully realized family saga about three independent women and how personal choices affect their lives. 

Feminist themes embody the soul of Kerri Maher’s novels. She’s fictionally explored the historical lives of fiercely independent public women like Kick Kennedy (The Kennedy Debutante) and Grace Kelly (The Girl in White Gloves). She’s also told the story of a humble woman who changed the world and the literary community of the 1920s in The Paris Bookseller. And in All You Have to Do is Call, she evoked the 1970s, extoling the power of female support systems. 

In Maher’s fifth novel, Summer of Love, she braids together two eras, 1967 and 2015, depicting how the past informs the present for three women of the Hartley family. 

Ambitious and inventive Miranda Hartley, the “first woman vintner” of Napa Valley, is inspired and challenged by overseeing the family-run winery. Miranda grew up with her free-spirited sister, Winnie, a poet, who bailed on the family business and took off to San Francisco in the 1960s. When Miranda’s now adult daughter, Dawn, a freelance set designer--and a closeted alcoholic grappling with sobriety and finding her place in the world--exhumes a family secret, the delicate balance of life comes undone and questions long buried about the sisters must get answered. 

Maher is an evocative storyteller whose literary prowess is on full display. Summer of Love delivers an impactful, surprising story about the bonds shared between sisters, mothers and daughters, and friends—and how hard it is to hold on to those we love and also learn to let go. 

Summer of Love by Kerri Maher

Berkley (Penguin Random House), $30.00 hardcover, 9780593816394, 368 pages

Publishing Date: July 7, 2026

To order this book on Bookshop.org, link HERE

Learn more about Kerri Maher HERE

The Lost Book of First Loves

RaeAnne Thayne, a prolific author of women’s fiction, delivers a heartfelt, emotionally moving story about how secrets revealed change the lives of two women in extraordinary ways.

Juniper “June” Connelly, based in Puget Sound (Washington State), is a 34-year-old, seemingly healthy, high-powered, intimidating career woman who expects much of herself and those who work under her employ. Just as she is about to fire her latest unpaid intern, Allison Wells, a 26-year-old recent law school graduate, June collapses from a heart attack and none other than Allison saves her life. This sets up a complex dynamic that forever links the two women—in more ways than one.

 

It seems that Allison’s career aspirations were something of a pretext. After the death of her literary icon father, a shocking secret sets Allison on a quest to wheedle her way to the internship. Her intent is to get to know June better as a DNA test formerly revealed that she and June, her boss, are actually half-sisters. But before Allison has a chance to enlighten June to the truth, the health emergency takes precedence.

 

As a result, the two likeable women forge an unlikely bond of friendship where Allison actually invites June, in need of R&R and healing, to use the "family cabin" in a small Wyoming town.  Over the course of one summer and June’s convalescence, the two women grapple with the missing pieces of their lives and new love interests as they both discover the real meaning of family.

Thayne (The December Market) delivers another tender, winning romance that’s sure to inspire hope for new beginning and second chances.

 

The Lost Book of First Loves by RaeAnne Thayne

Canary Street Press (HarperCollins/MIRA/Harlequin), $30.00 hardcover, 9781445467713, 352 pages

Publishing Date: June 3, 2025

To order this book on Bookshop.org link HERE

Learn more about RaeAnne Thayne HERE

 

Beach Vibes

An emotionally thought-provoking novel about two entangled couples who face a betrayal that tests their love and loyalty.

Susan Mallery takes a surprisingly deep dive into the complicated dynamics of family and friendship in her emotionally resonant novel, Beach Vibes.
 
Two sets of adult siblings--two women and their two brothers--anchor the story, which centers on Beth Nield, a recently divorced, 38-year-old who owns and operates Surf Sandwiches, an eatery in Malibu, Calif.
 
Workaholic Beth now lives with her 67-year-old, widowed Aunt Agatha who took in Beth and Rick, her younger brother by three years, when they were just children. Protective, self-sacrificing Beth always looked out for Rick—proudly rooting on her smart, good-looking, charmingly single brother, who is now a “big-shot surgeon.” When Beth starts to volunteer at a local food bank, she meets Jana Mead, a hard-working medical billing clerk who dreams of becoming a nurse. Jana is a single mother to a precocious four-year-old and lives with her widowed brother, Teddy, and his four children. As Beth and Jana strike up a friendship, Beth realizes that Jana is actually dating her brother, Rick. The lives of these four people intersect and overlap, and Beth starts a romance with Teddy. Problems arise, however, when a betrayal amidst the quartet raises questions surrounding love and loyalty, while also testing the bonds of family and friendship.

A welcome wave of thought-provoking dilemmas washes over what initially appears a breezy beach read. First-rate storyteller Mallery (One Big Happy Family) intimately plumbs the depths of perception and self-discovery.

Beach Vibes by Susan Mallery

Canary Street Press, $30.00 hardcover, 9781335402530, 384 pages

Publication Date: March 18, 2025

Learn more about Susan Mallery HERE

 

 

 

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 

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 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

Truth and Other Lies

A provocative, fast-paced novel about a down on her luck reporter who returns home only to face startling, dangerous truths that upend her life.

In Truth and Other Lies, debut author Maggie Smith has written a provocative, fast-paced novel of Women’s Fiction about Megan Barnes, a lovelorn, financially broke 25-year-old investigative journalist who is forced to return home to Chicago, where she moves in with her mother, Helen. Intent on regrouping and strategizing the next chapter of her life, Megan’s plans are short-lived when she learns that her pro-life mother--once a housewife--has surprisingly decided to run for U.S. Congress. As conservative mother and liberal-leaning daughter lock horns, not seeing the world and issues in it in the same light, Megan is offered a PR job to help launch a new memoir by Jocelyn Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer whom Megan has always looked up to. Jones dangles a carrot in front of Megan: if Megan can make her book launch a success, Jones will use her connections and get Megan a job at the prestigious Chicago Tribune. However, in the midst of the book launch, dark secrets--with tentacles--about Jones emerge on social media, which ultimately ensnare Megan and test her mettle. She is forced to question herself, the meaning of truth and her loyalties.

 

Smith’s propulsive, enthralling first novel is tightly plotted with political intrigue and features three, disparate female characters who each face thought-provoking, hot-button contemporary issues that will entice readers with ratcheting romance and suspense--and a heart-racing conclusion.

 

Truth and Lies: A Novel by Maggie Smith

Ten16Press, $18.99 paperback, 9781645382624, 360 pages

Publication Date: March 8, 2021

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

Beware the Mermaids

 

This exciting, emotionally charged story follows an acrimoniously divorcing couple who compete in a high-stakes boat race.

Carrie Talick's exciting first novel, Beware the Mermaids, opens with a scene that packs a wallop. Nancy Hadley, a native Californian who came from modest beginnings to become a wealthy housewife, lives in Hermosa Beach. Nancy--a lifelong sailor, thanks to a doting Finnish grandfather who instilled in her an instinct and love for the sea--cheerfully escorts a charity league on a tour of the Bucephalus, a 38-foot racing yacht owned by Nancy and her husband, Roger. As the group boards the well-appointed sailing vessel, Nancy catches scheming, philandering Roger in a compromising position with none other than Nancy's cunning, devious nemesis, a woman who hailed from the East Coast and clawed her way into "the upper echelons of society."

 

What follows is the start of an acrimonious divorce between Nancy and Roger. The Bucephalus, which both refuse to relinquish, becomes the obstacle in finalizing the legalities of their split. Locked in a grueling tug-of-war, determined Nancy gears up for a fight. She moves out of their lavish home, buys a boat of her own to live on and rallies the support of her tight-knit circle of girlfriends, intent on teaching them how to sail. When Nancy suggests that she and Roger, via competing vessels and crews, both enter the Border Dash Race, which sails from Newport Harbor to Ensenada, Mexico--winner take all--the stage is set for high-stakes fun and drama.

 

Fans of women's fiction will eagerly climb aboard Talik's smart, sassy, suspenseful story that sails through choppy waters and shifting tides of betrayal, friendship and new romance.

 

Beware the Mermaids by Carrie Talick

Alcove Press, $16.99 paperback, 9781643858241, 352 pages

Publication Date: August 10, 2021

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 (August 31, 2021), link HERE

The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany

A delightful romantic story centered on three single women of an Italian family who set off to Italy to break a 200-year-old curse. 

Long-simmering resentments and buried secrets permeate The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany, a romantic, beautifully rendered, sweepingly complex family saga.

 

Emilia Antonelli, 29, of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, is a second-generation Italian American. She lives a simple, manageable life, resigned to remaining single forever, working in the family delicatessen and bakery, while also secretly pursuing a "little writing hobby." Emilia lives under the shadow of a family curse that goes back 200 years: all second-born daughters are cursed to live a life without love. After their mother died, Emilia and her older sister, Daria, were raised by their mild-mannered father and the domineering Nonna Rosa, their mother's mother and the surly, infinitely controlling backbone of the family. Nonna Rosa favors Daria, the first-born granddaughter, and belittles Emilia.

 

Emilia's life takes a drastic turn when she receives a letter from Paolina Fontana, her long-lost great-aunt, who lives in Philadelphia. "Aunt Poppy" is flamboyant, artsy and colorful. She is Nonna Rosa's younger sister, shunned by the family decades earlier. But Poppy writes to Emilia and Luciana, another second-born cousin, offering to treat them both to an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy to celebrate Poppy's 80th birthday. At the cathedral in the town of Ravello, Poppy intends to reunite with her one true love, with the intention of also breaking the family curse.

What ensues is an exciting excursion through Italy--its culture and fineries; romance and history--for the three women. Aunt Poppy proves warm, charming and wise. Lori Nelson Spielman (Sweet Forgiveness) provides first-rate storytelling and nuanced, clearly defined characters that will captivate readers right up to the surprising finale.

The Star-Crossed Sistersof Tuscany by Lori Nelson Spielman

Berkley-Penguin, $16.00 Paperback, 9781984803160, 400 pages

Publication Date: November 27, 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 (November 27, 2020), link HERE

 

To read the longer form of this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (October 23, 2020), link HERE

The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop

Fannie Flagg delivers feel-good fun, revisiting stories about a small Alabama town--focusing on a beloved local--from her popular 1987 novel.

Fannie Flagg's enduring Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café was published in 1987 (and made into a movie in 1992). The heartwarming novel explored the friendship between a disillusioned, middle-aged housewife and Ninny Threadgoode, an elderly woman living out her days in a nursing home. Ninny had astonishing tales to tell about a bustling railroad cafe in a small Alabama town east of Birmingham in the 1930s.

 

Flagg's long-awaited sequel focuses on Buddy Threadgoode, Jr., son of the late Ruth Jamison, who once ran the Whistle Stop Cafe with Imogene "Idgie" Threadgoode, an adventurous, rebellious tomboy. Through a patchwork quilt of scenes, Bud's history unfolds from the 1930s: how he managed life with a missing arm, an injury incurred in a train accident when he was six years old, and became a veterinarian; how Aunt Idgie became Bud's best friend and cheerleader, even after she sold the café and moved to Florida; how Bud fell in love with and married his childhood sweetheart, and they raised a daughter, Ruthie, a woman with her own story to tell.

 

As in Fried Green Tomatoes, Flagg infuses short chapter vignettes with cozy snippets of gossip about Whistle Stop townsfolk--memorable characters from the first book--who left town and set down roots elsewhere. Bud--now in his 80s, retired and widowed--looks back lovingly and longingly at his Whistle Stop days. The story blossoms in vintage Flagg style--folksy and feel-good. An abundance of Southern charm will delight both readers eager to journey back to beloved Whistle Stop and also those wanting to visit for the very first time.

The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop: A Novel by Fannie Flagg

Random House, $28.00 Hardcover, 9780593133842, 304 pages

Publication Date: October 20, 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 (October 27, 2020), link HERE

The Cookbook Club

Three women--strangers facing new beginnings--bond over a communal love of food, cooking and sharing recipes.

Over the course of 13 novels, author Beth Harbison (Every Time You Go Away; Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger) has demonstrated that she knows what makes women tick--and what ticks them off. In The Cookbook Club, her 14th book, she dishes up an ensemble cast of richly drawn characters: three women, strangers from the Washington, D.C., area, who are each in the throes of a personal conflict and romantic dilemma.

When solid and sensible Margo throws out her philandering husband, she discovers an online cookbook club founded by Trista, a single, take-charge, former lawyer. Trista, fired from her job, ditches her legal career, invests in a bar and restaurant and forms the cookbook club in an effort to nurture her passion for trying out new recipes. Her solicitation for group members also draws the attention of jilted Margo and Aja, a loving, good-natured yoga instructor--single and pregnant with a child for whom the baby's very handsome, wealthy, ne'er-do-well father has no interest.

The three women--all near 30 years old and facing new beginnings--forge a friendship bonded by their culinary cravings. When the group gathers each month, they whip up and share a dish, along with recipes. The meetings allow the women to indulge their gastronomic appetites while supporting each other through respective challenges.

Harbison's storytelling is full-bodied and sharp. Wit and humor, along with delicious plot twists and a trove of included recipes, sweeten contemporary women's issues.

The Cookbook Club: A Novel of Food and Friendship by Beth Harbison

Morrow Paperbacks, $16.99 Paperback, 9780062958624, 384 pages

Publication Date: October 20, 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 (October 27, 2020), link HERE