The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise

A wildly fun road trip adventure about an unpredictable octogenarian, with a secret past, who goes on the lam with her 20something caretaker.

Colleen Oakley takes readers on an off-beat, whirlwind road trip adventure--with an underlying serious message--in The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise.

 

Louise Constance Wilt is an unpredictable, whip-smart, Atlanta, Georgia native. With the 84-year-old widow hobbling around on a bum hip, her children, who live hours away, decide it’s time for their mother to have some live-in help. Enter floundering, 21-year-old, Tanner Quimby, whose promising college sports scholarship--and dreams of playing soccer professionally--are sidelined by a very badly broken leg. The arrangement would appear a win-win for the two injured women. However, after some initial, mutual resistance--and Tanner attuned to some dubious red flags in Louise’s behavior--the duo set off on an impulsive road trip. When Louise’s daughter files a missing persons’ report, the family discovers that Louise has actually been living under an alias for years—on an FBI watchlist involving a notorious jewel heist from Boston in the 1970s. Could this be true? And does this have anything to do with Louise and Tanner suddenly going on the lam?

 

Well-structured elements of mystery and suspense infuse this enjoyable friendship story about lives well-lived—however burdened by challenges and questionable choices. A lively plot, off-beat characters and surprising twists bring levity to darker themes that probe issues of feminism and aging. Oakley’s storytelling (The Invisible Husband of Frick Island, You Were There Too) is first rate. Readers will eagerly hop aboard this wildly fun, greatly entertaining ride.

The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise by Colleen Oakley

Berkley (Penguin), $27.00 hardcover, 9780593200803, 352 pages

Publishing Date: March 28, 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 (March 24, 2023), link HERE

Varina Palladino's Jersey Italian Love Story

 

A lively, fun-loving novel about the exploits of a large, unwieldy and passionate Italian-American family on the brink of rebirth and change.

 

A big, bold, brash Italian-American family is at the heart of Varina Palladino’s Jersey Italian Love Story. This fun-loving, bittersweet novel by Terri-Lynne DeFino orbits around Varina Palladino, a hard-working, widow. Now happily-single, the 70-year-old manages the family’s local Italian food specialty shop in Wyldale, New Jersey.

 

Many characters and plotlines are threaded through Varina’s life. This includes Varina’s spry, 92-year-old mother, Sylvia, whose is determined to find a romantic match for Varina. With the help of Donatella--Varina’s n’er do well daughter; Sylvia’s granddaughter--the two Palladino women secretly advertise Varina’s singlehood. The boldness of their plan backfires at the same time Varina’s three adult children face their own life challenges. This includes Dante, running the family construction business and flirting with divorce, and Davide, a hair salon owner, who is at odds with his erratic, younger sister, Donatella, who just can’t seem to get her life on track. There’s also good-natured, reliable Paulie, once the Palladino’s neighbor, now their border, who was pseudo-adopted by Varina after he came out as gay and his own family disowned him. When Varina, on her birthday, decides to celebrate by fulfilling her lifelong dream to travel, her decision becomes just one of many life-changing transitions made by each member of the family.

 

From the passions of love and family fireworks, to authentic recipes, Italian superstitions and expressions, DeFino (The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers) serves up a hilariously colorful, contemporary epic where lovably flawed characters and lively Italian details will wholeheartedly charm readers.

 

Varina Palladino’s Jersey Italian Love Story by Terri-Lynne DeFino

William Morrow & Company, $27.99 hardcover, 9780063228436, 416 pages

Publishing Date: February 14, 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 (March 3, 2023), link HERE

Good Grief

A captivating, impeccably rich study about the many ways companion animals enrich lives and how people mourn and grieve their loss. 

 

“When we open our hearts to animals, death is the inevitable price,” writes E.B. Bartels, a former bookseller at Newtonville Books, Mass. Good Grief, her impeccably researched first book, offers deeply personal stories about the many ways companion animals enrich lives and how animal lovers must ultimately cope with the pain of their loss.

 

Having a pet is a voluntary choice, and mourning pets is nothing new. Bartels states, “…67 percent of American households, 84.9 million homes, own ‘some sort of pet’…despite the inevitable loss that comes with that relationship, the ways people grieve a dead pet aren’t always taken seriously.” Bartels, a life-long and devout animal lover, has grappled with this predicament since she was a child. Her father loved animals, but her mother claimed she was “violently allergic” to “anything with fur, feathers, or hair.” That left young, animal-loving Bartels to cultivate fresh water fish in table-top aquariums. When “trouble in (fish) paradise” began and occupants were found floating in the tank and/or were swallowed up by larger fish, Bartels became intrigued by the nature of loss and grief. Starting in kindergarten, she developed something of a “pet aftercare industry,” where she assisted with animal funerals and burials with peers at school. 

 

This in-depth, richly informative narrative is replete with down-to-earth stories from Bartels herself and those of ordinary pet lovers, pet care professionals, celebrities and historians. The pivotal roles pet birds, reptiles, rodents, horses, dogs and cats have played in personal lives--and how they are ultimately grieved and remembered--are interspersed among fascinating historical facts: The Egyptians treasured the intimacy offered by pets and exotic animals and were known to bury them alongside humans in the same sarcophagi. The Summum community, a contemporary religious group in Utah, mummifies--preserves, in whole--their beloved animal companions. Popular icon, Barbra Streisand was so devastated by the loss of her beloved 14-year-old dog, Samantha, that she had her cloned in order to keep “some part of her alive.” Bartels thoroughly examines these and many other topics including euthanasia, taxidermy, ideas about reincarnation, pet cemeteries and more.

 

Readers, like Bartels, who long to consciously comprehend the pet-human bond--why people care so much for their pets, in life and in death, and what makes the bond so worthwhile and why--will be educated, greatly enriched and find much to reflect upon.

 

Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter by E.B. Bartels

Mariner Books (Harper Collins Publishers), $27.99 hardcover, 272 pages, 9780358212331

Publication Date: August 2, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND link HERE

 

NOTE: To read this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (May 3, 2022 ), link HERE

 

NOTE: To read a condensed version of this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 1, 2022), 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

The Dead Romantics

A refreshingly fun, energetic novel about a romantically disillusioned, blocked romance writer whose beliefs about love are transformed by a handsome ghost.

Ashley Poston’s fun, lighthearted novels for young adults offer a blend of magical realism infused with wit and romance. Geekerella is a clever send-up about what happens when a nerdy Cinderella-type attends a Sci-fi convention. In Heart of Iron, a princess in outer-space must find her way back home with the help of lovable misfits.

 

The Dead Romantics, Poston’s first book for adults, a romantic comedy, centers on Florence Minerva Day, a smart, snarky millennial who is nursing a broken heart and suffering from writer’s block. Florence is emotionally on the skids. Having published a romance novel that received a less-than-stellar reception, downtrodden Florence became an assistant-turned-ghostwriter for Ann Nichols, one of “romance’s greats”—a well-established, popular author who hasn’t left her home in Maine for the five years that Florence has been the secret source behind her writing success. In the midst of her depression, Florence is floundering, too turned off by love to write about it and meet a looming deadline--already extended three times--to finish and deliver Nichols’s next book to the new editor at her publishing house, Benji Andor. The handsome hottie is cold and no nonsense. He totally unnerves Florence by threatening legal action if the new Nichols book isn’t turned in asap.

 

Amidst Florence’s intent to finish the manuscript, she runs into her ex, also a writer, a man who stole the story of Florence’s own life—personal secrets she shared with him about her family and their funeral home business and how Florence interacts with ghosts--and turned her story into a book that sold at auction for a million dollars. Weary after seeing her successful, user-ex again and faced with the impending writing deadline, Florence’s life further tailspins when she is summoned from her home in Hoboken, N.J., back to Mairmont, South Carolina to deal with the devastating sudden death of a family member. Being back in a place she longed to escape suddenly resurrects the past and elicits the presence of a handsome ghost who wrenches Florence from her rut and upends her beliefs about love.

 

Romance, chaos and ratcheting complications are central components to Poston’s refreshingly fun, spunky romcoms—and The Dead Romantics is no exception. The beauty and charm of Poston’s storytelling continues to make miraculous happy endings out of the messes from which ordinary people often find themselves embroiled.

 

The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston

Berkley (Penguin Books), $16.00 paperback, 368 pages, 9780593336489

Publication Date: June 28, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND link HERE

 

NOTE: To read this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (May 3, 2022 ), link HERE

 

NOTE: To read a condensed version of this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 1, 2022), link HERE

Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting

An uplifting, immensely entertaining novel about how strangers on a commuter train becomes unlikely friends via a shared near-death experience. 

In the world today, many people tend to live anonymously, in their own personal microcosms. However, in Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, British author Clare Pooley brings people together--strangers--in such a fun, spirited way that it’s bound to spark readers to expand their worldview.

 

This endearing novel, told from the points of view of an ensemble cast of vividly drawn characters, starts on a London commuter train. At the center of it all is Iona Iverson, a vibrantly quirky, 57-year-old magazine advice therapist--an observant creature of habit with job security issues--who leaves Bea, her significant other, and sets off to work with her beloved French bulldog, Lulu. Every day, Iona and Lulu sit in the same carriage--usually in the “seventh aisle,” seat “number three”--as the train traverses ten stops over 36 minutes from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station. In her mind, Iona assigns clever pet names to the seasoned commuters with whom she daily co-exists, but never speaks to. This includes “Impossibly-Pretty-Bookworm” and “Mr.-Too-Good-to-beTrue.” The other passengers, likewise, do the same—Iona is referred to by one as “Rainbow Lady” and another as “Crazy Dog Woman.”

 

One fateful day, a man who doesn’t normally ride the 8:06 a.m. train--whom Iona bills as a “Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader,” who talks too loudly on his mobile phone and refers to his wife as “the ball and chain”--boards Iona’s carriage. He dresses exquisitely but has his look “ruined” because he displays an “extraordinary sense of entitlement which only really comes with being white, male, heterosexual and excessively solvent.” When he starts choking on a grape from his fruit salad, the normal, everyday order of the commute is upended. A medically capable oncology nurse, Sanjay--who has the hots for the “Impossibly-Pretty-Bookworm” but lacks romantic confidence--performs the Heimlich maneuver on the “Manspreader.” Sanjay’s heroic, life-saving act serves as a catalyst that suddenly transforms the travelers from strangers into friends. Over the course of the story, the soul-filled truth of each person connected to the near-death experience is revealed. The stereotyping of appearances can be very deceiving.

 

As in her previous novel, The Authenticity Project, Pooley’s grasp on the constraints and longings of the human condition proves immensely entertaining. Readers will be charmed by this uplifting, hopeful story rife with tender insights. Traveling with Iona Iverson is a literary journey well worth taking.

 

Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting: A Novel by Clare Pooley

Pamela Dorman Books (Penguin Books), $27.00 hardcover, 352 pages, 9781984878649

Publishing Date: June 7, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND link HERE

 

NOTE: To read this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (April 14, 2022 ), link HERE

 

NOTE: To read a condensed version of this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (June 6, 2022), link HERE

 

Pets of Park Avenue

A fun, endearing rom-com about how an estranged couples’ dog reunites them, forcing them to reconcile their feelings for each other. 

Stefanie London delivers a hearty helping of dogs and romance in her endearing second novel, Pets of Park Avenue.

Scout Myers, a 26-year-old New Yorker, works for a premiere pet social media and talent agency run by her successful best friend, Isla, the winning protagonist from the first book in the Paws in the City series, The Dachshund Wears Prada. When Scout is tasked with doing a makeover of a socially connected Bichon Frise for a photoshoot, things accidentally go awry—the dog’s cottony-white coat is suddenly transformed into hot pink. Scout, in a bind, is left no choice but to ask her ex, Lane, if she can borrow his Bichon--Twinkle Stardust, “Star”--a well-behaved near lookalike to serve as a stand-in. Lane and Scout had a whirlwind romance and marriage that flopped five years before. The two never officially divorced. What starts as a one-shot-deal to borrow “Star,” soon reunites the former lovers. Lane--a Big Tech genius who runs a multi-million-dollar company--still has a soft spot for Scout, who left him after only one month of marriage because she felt she could not measure up to him and his ideals. Lovable “Star” serves as a bridge in this smart, sexy rom-com that unravels the couples’ challenging personal pasts and explains why things soured between them. Can they make amends?

 

London’s likeable characters resonate with hidden depths as she mines their hearts to deliver a fun, revealing story that will have readers rooting wholeheartedly for love--and dogs--to conquer all.

 

Pets of Park Avenue: Paws in the City (Book 2) by Stefanie London

HQN: Original Edition, $15.99 paperback, 366 pages, 9781335498199

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 20, 2023), link HERE