The Santa Suit by Mary Kay Andrews

 

In Mary Kay Andrews’ novella, The Santa Suit, Ivy Perkins is looking for a fresh start after a divorce from a cheating husband…and best friend. In her mind’s eye, she pictures an old, white farmhouse will be the foundation to her new beginning. She buys such after seeing it, The Four Roses, on the Internet. It’s more rundown than the photo indicates, but Ivy is up for the challenge, starting with painting some rooms.

Her friendly neighborhood realtor, Ezra, is always willing to lend a hand, and before long, he has a crush on Ivy, who does her best to discourage him…for a while.

When clearing out the closet, she discovers an old Santa suit that the previous owner used to don to entertain the children during the small North Carolina town’s Christmas stroll. Ivy finds a note in a pocket of the old suit from a little girl wanting Santa to bring her father home from Viet Nam for Christmas. Intrigued, Ivy begins to ask around town about the little girl, and while on this mission, she starts making friends.

Just in time for the holidays, The Santa Suit will warm hearts as Ivy warms hers and untangles the mystery of the little girl’s note to Santa.

Mary Kay Andrews, the Queen of Summer Reads, has provided readers with a holiday novella. Andrews, a pseudonym for Kathy Hogan Trocheck, is one of the authors I follow faithfully. A former journalist, she is based in Atlanta with her own hideaway on Tybee Island.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting July 27, 2021.

I would like to thank St. Martin's Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash

 

When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash is a page-turner of a novel. One night in October of 1984, Sheriff Winston Barnes and his wife are startled from their sleep by what sounds like a low-flying plane at a nearby airfield. When he goes to investigate, he finds a large airplane sitting sideways on the runway with no crew or cargo as well as a local man lying dead in the grass near the plane.

On this coastal island of North Carolina, rumors begin to fly as the sheriff investigates the mystery of the plane and the murder. Because the dead man is the son of a local civil rights leader, unresolved race relations heat up in the town.  The widow’s home is attacked by a mob with the Confederate flag flying that throws something through a window and threatens the life of her brother. The civil rights leader demands more from the sheriff than he can deliver legally.

On the home front, the sheriff’s wife is battling cancer, and their grown daughter has returned home after the death of her child. The sheriff is up for re-election within a week, and the support for the office seems to be behind his opposing candidate, Brad Frye, a known bigot, with even Barnes’ deputies showing divided loyalty. The sheriff really needs to bring this investigation to a satisfying resolution if he has any hope of retaining the office.

Complicating the investigation is the arrival of the FBI, ready to take over the case. With all resources stretched to the limit, Sheriff Barnes must balance work and home and keep the racial tensions from erupting while figuring out the right thing to do as all the pieces come together in this tension-filled narrative.

Wiley Cash teaches fiction writing and literature at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, where he serves as Alumni Author-in-Residence. The best-selling author of The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy, he lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughters.  

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting July 26, 2021.

I would like to thank William Morrow and Custom House and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

Forever Young: a Memoir by Hayley Mills

 Forever Young: A Memoir by actress Hayley Mills chronicles her recollections of her childhood when she became a Disney star to transitioning to grownup roles. Hayley was championed by Walt Disney himself in such movies as Pollyanna, The Parent Trap, and That Darn Cat. The daughter of actor John Mills and playwright Mary Hayley Bell, Mills found her transition from a wholesome teen to more mature roles difficult as fans wanted her to stay “forever young.”

Mills offers a look into her family, and if readers thought she lived a charmed life, she did, but not without obstacles. She shared her parents with an older sister, the actress Juliet Mills, and a younger brother Jonathan Mills. While she had a marvelous relationship with her father, she often found herself at odds with her mother, who she felt drank too much. Mills also experienced the fate of other child actors whose income was never realized as the Crown received most of it.

While the scope of the book covers her childhood through the birth of her first child, there is still much opportunity for another memoir about her adult life…and I, as a great fan from childhood on, hope that she will take a breath then write the second half of her memoirs.

Hayley Mills was born in London, where she currently resides. Born in 1946, she made her first appearance in films in 1959 in Tiger Bay, starring her father. Living in California for many years, she starred in “Good Morning, Miss Bliss,” the Disney forerunner of “Saved by the Bell,” more material that could be mined for a second memoir.