When you lose the love of your life, how do you find yourself again?

For Tabitha, the day that changed everything started like any other.

She woke up, slid her feet into fluffy slippers, wrapped herself in a dressing gown and tiptoed out of her bedroom, leaving her husband Andy sleeping. Downstairs, she boiled the kettle and enjoyed a cup of tea as the sun rose.

Upstairs, Andy’s alarm sounded, and Tabitha took him a freshly brewed coffee, like every other morning.  Except today, the incessant beeping rang out and her husband hadn’t stirred. She called his name, she nudged his shoulder. But Andy wouldn’t wake up.

Three years later Tabitha is trying her hardest to get by in the shadow of her grief. She may have lost the love of her life but she won’t give up on the family they dreamed of. Fostering troublesome teenage girls and a newborn baby is a chance to piece together her broken heart.

But being a mother isn’t easy, and neither is healing the heartache she carries around. After losing everything, could saving these three children help Tabitha save herself too?

This stunning tale will make you laugh and cry in equal measure, hold your loved ones close and see the beauty in the little things in life. Fans of Jojo Moyes, Jodi Picoult and Diane Chamberlain will love this moving and uplifting story.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

She wished she could grab a handful of his ashes and scatter them in all the places they’d loved. She wished they were like seeds and in planting them, they’d bring him back. That in sowing them in the quarters of the world that they’d loved, she’d be able to capture moments as if they were happening all over again. That by bringing him back in that way she’d feel that she was being held by him once again and somehow his seed would settle inside her and they’d go on to have the family they’d dreamed of.

‘You don’t want to talk about it because it hurts. Some things are better left unsaid. Some things are better dealt with by eating ice cream.’ And just like that, Tabitha had been schooled by a fifteen-year-old. Because how could she argue with that.

My Review:

This was a slowly evolving and heart-squeezing women’s fiction tale of loss and family drama. This stubborn young widow must have lost her mind for taking on two obnoxious, challenging, and troubled fifteen-year-olds twins and a medically involved newborn as her first attempt at fostering children; in addition to living out in the middle of nowhere and without transportation. I would have needed a fully stocked wine cellar, bars on the windows, and an Uber and therapist on speed dial before even considering such an insane scheme. This was my introduction to the taut storytelling of Catherine Miller, and her angsty tale was thoughtfully and perceptively written with observant insights while teasing and poking at my curiosity as she doesn’t let us in on the actual events of the day that changed everything until 84% into the book, and by then, I had puzzled out the correct scenario that was, thankfully, far afield of my initial assumption.

.

About the Author

William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (January 14, 2020)

If you love Susan Mallery and Jill Shalvis, you won’t want to miss this new novel of second chances, dogs, and knitting, from the author of Pupcakes and Sit! Stay! Speak!

Laid off, cheated on, mugged: what else can go wrong in Maeve Stephens’ life? So when she learns her birth mother has left her a house, a vintage VW Beetle, and a marauding cat, in the small town of Timber Creek, Washington, she packs up to discover the truth about her past.

She arrives to the sight of a cheerful bulldog abandoned on her front porch, a reclusive but tempting author living next door, and a set of ready-made friends at the St. Francis Society for Wayward Pets, where women knit colorful sweaters for the dogs and cats in their care. But there’s also an undercurrent of something that doesn’t sit right with Maeve. What’s the secret (besides her!) that her mother had hidden?

If Maeve is going to make Timber Creek her home, she must figure out where she fits in and unravel the truth about her past. But is she ready to be adopted again—this time, by an entire town…?

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Your kids ought to be on a birth control commercial or something… I’m pretty sure their high-pitched shrieks would be enough for anybody to beg for the pill.

I made a big production of rummaging around in my purse before Holly sighed and handed over her platinum card… “Well, it wasn’t like that dude was going to accept the hairy Tic Tacs in the bottom of that gross purse of yours…”

The man standing before wasn’t ugly or anything-he was just… odd looking. With his curly red hair and smattering of freckles combined with his crisp black suit, he looked a bit like how I imagined Carrot Top would have looked if he’d picked a nine-to-five job instead of steroid use.

Well, her father is about fifteen pounds of crazy in a five-pound bucket.

My Review:

I adore this author and always enjoy and revel in her emotive and heart-squeezing tales, clever wit, engaging storylines, and insightful observations of complex social issues. Annie England Noblin is a master storyteller and St. Francis Society for Wayward Pets deftly tackled a variety of thorny and unfortunately all too common situations and did so with agility, thoughtful awareness, and profound sensitivity for such complicated issues as family violence, addiction, adoption and identify issues, teenage pregnancy, poverty, physical disability, and small-town living. The characters were curiously compelling, quirky, well fleshed out, and highly accessible though not always likable. The well-crafted storylines were easy to follow, thoughtfully written, unpredictable, and squeezed my heart between giggle-snorts and smirks with the various threads miraculously came together to form an uplifting and highly satisfying conclusion. I am already eager to see what Ms. Noblin comes up with next.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Her face was pale with a glistening sheen of sweat. She blinked like a mole in a sunbeam.

The decor was as Lena expected: the ubiquitous chintz of a house decorated in the seventies. It smelt of mothballs and loneliness.

I wish I’d never borrowed from those scoundrels! … I should have known not to get involved with them as soon as I went to their office. It was above a Turkish barbershop, you know. Men getting their ear hairs singed off with matches while they drink coffee sludge and home-brewed liquor and chain-smoke.

The sun had made Islington like an oven. As she’d walked through Islington Green, she’d seen usually conservative Londoners rolling up their trousers and removing their shirts, lying prostrated around the tiny stretch of grass as if victims of battle. Tomorrow they’d be an assortment of shades of angry pink, bad-tempered and painful to the touch as they crowded themselves into humid tube carriages.

A pity such a heavenly face has been installed on an empty brain. Like painting the Sistine Chapel with crayons.

 My Review:

I was pleasantly entertained by this amusing cozy mystery, I certainly didn’t guess the outcome and I liked that I couldn’t. A Clean Canvas was the second in a series, and while I would most likely enjoy reading the first book, it was not necessary as this volume had strong legs and could stand, walk, and run well enough on its own. I always find it interesting to be given the view of an outsider and Lena was a hard-working and ambitious Hungarian immigrant who struggled with the nuances of the English language as well as the customs and idioms. She endeavored to keep herself contained but her malapropisms and keen observations were clever, colorful, and humorous. Lena was proud, and I was proud of and for her to have established her own cleaning company, and she always had her “eyeball open” looking for sidelines to incorporate and expand her business. I enjoyed Ms. Mundy’s style and characters enough to continue on with the next in the series with A Messy Affair.