Once Upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan

 

Author Patti Callahan has long wondered about the origin of the world of Narnia of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and she explores this curiosity in her new book, Once Upon a Wardrobe. In this novel, Callahan creates the back story by exploring the early life of the Ireland native, author C.S. Lewis.

To tell this story set in December of 1950 in Worcester, England of how Narnia came to be, Callahan has created a brother and sister, George and Megs Devonshire. Eight-year-old George has a heart condition that could end his life at any time. Megs is a student at Somerville College, part of Oxford University, where Lewis teaches. George charges Megs with finding out, “Where did Narnia come from?” From the author’s imagination is not an answer George wants to accept.

Megs starts to hang out around the author’s home in hopes of catching him long enough to find out the answer. Instead, the author’s brother invites her into their home so she can ask Lewis her important question. Soon, Megs becomes a regular visitor to the Lewis home where she is entertained with stories about the brothers’ childhoods. She shares these stories with George when she returns home to Worcester regularly instead of staying in Oxford.

Megs and George put together the pieces of the Lewis brothers’ lives shared in story-form to figure out some answers for themselves. Fans of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as well as of Callahan’s books will be sure to add this enchanting tale to their to-be-read pile.

This is Callahan’s second book about C.S. Lewis as she wrote Becoming Mrs. Lewis in 2018 about his wife, Joy Davidman. A former pediatric nurse, Callahan is a co-creator and co-host of the weekly podcast Friends and Fiction on Facebook.  She is a full-time author, wife, and mother of three with homes in both Alabama and South Carolina.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting August 31, 2021.

I would like to thank Harper Muse, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

His Loving Wife by Miranda Smith

 

His Loving Wife by Miranda Smith should come with a warning: Reader, do not start unless you have the time to read it to the very end because this thriller begs no interruptions! The novel will be out October 4, 2021.

Kate Brooks grew up in the mountains of North Carolina but nothing in her upraising prepared her for a home invasion. The plot is boosted forward as Kate and her husband Andrew and children Willow and Noah are attempting to heal from that trauma months ago by renting a vacation home on the ocean.

Even though she tries, Kate cannot relax because she sees her intruder everywhere. Worse, she knows him, a guy named Paul who she dated in college. He’s out now on bail, and Kate is afraid for herself and her family. But even in jail, Paul is still reaching out, still threatening her. How is he able to do that? Who is helping him? This reader stayed up until the wee hours to find out those answers.

This psychological thriller is recommended to those readers who enjoyed novels like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.

Miranda Smith has worked as a staff writer at a local newspaper and as a high school English teacher. She writes domestic and psychological suspense books about complicated women, dark impulses, and Southern settings. She lives in East Tennessee with her husband and three children. Her other books include Not My Mother, The One Before, What I Know, and Some Days are Dark.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting August 31, 2021.

I would like to thank Bookouture and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman

 Readers who have been under the spell of the Owens family of the Practical Magic series are in luck as Alice Hoffman is bewitching readers with the final book in the series, The Book of Magic.

In her 2020 novel Magic Lessons, she outlined the centuries-old curse on the family to its source by telling the story of Maria Owens, the matriarch of the line.  The curse is on love and has continued for 300 years, but Jet Owens is about to spell out an action that will undo it as she faces her last seven days on earth.

Jet confides in her sister Franny about the deathwatch beetle now shadowing Jet. In the meantime, an accident has caused the love of one of their great-niece’s to be in a coma, an obvious playing out of the curse. Jet has left Franny a note about a book Jet found hidden in the library that will break the curse, but the book and the note have fallen into the hands of great-niece Kylie Owens by accident.

Sally, Kylie and Antonia’s mother, has long protected her daughters from the truth about their family. When she learns Kylie has fled to Europe to find out more information as she looks for a way to end the curse to save her boyfriend Gideon’s life, Sally, her sister Gillian, Aunt Franny, and Franny’s long-lost brother Vincent head first to Paris and then London to rescue Kylie from things she does not understand and help her undo the curse.

Unfortunately, reversing the 300-year-old curse will require a sacrifice: a life for a life. The path to freeing the Owens from the curse is tangled as the group enlists a professor/writer to help find Kylie in England, the home of Maria Owens three centuries ago.

Alice Hoffman has written these final two books as a response to her readers who thirsted for more. “My readers sent me back to the world of Practical Magic,” she said in an interview in the Library Journal. “I had so many letters and messages asking for more, and after writing The Rules of Magic, which takes place in the 60s and 70s, I decided to go all the way back, to the original Owens ancestor, Maria Owens. I’m always interested in how the past influences the present, who the ghosts in the nursery are, who has influenced us, even if we never knew them.” In addition to the Practical Magic series and other novels, she writes short stories. Born in New York, Hoffman lives in Boston.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting August 20, 2021.

I would like to thank Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

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.

 

The Kitchen Front by Jennifer Ryan

 

Long before cooking shows on the Food Network, England enjoyed a BBC program called The Kitchen Front, also the title of the latest novel by Jennifer Ryan. The show is looking for a female hostess, and since the British love nothing better than a good contest, four women compete for the spot.

The challenge promises a much-needed boost in the lives of each of women during World War II: Audrey, a war-widow needs more income to take care of her three children and her falling-down house; her sister Gwendoline, a battered wife who sees the contest as a chance to escape her husband; Nell, Gwendoline’s kitchen maid hopes the contest will help her leave a service position; and Zelda, a single woman with a big secret is also a chef who is desperate to compete with men in her profession.

Not only do the women each have to prepare three amazing dishes to win the contest, but they also must do so with the rationing of some groceries and the unavailability of others. For the winner, the Kitchen Network will be a dream come true, but what will happen to runners-up?

Jennifer Ryan was “a nonfiction book editor, first editing politics and economics at The Economist Books, and then moving on to the BBC, DK, and other publishers, editing books on health, cooking, wine, and history.” She wanted to share her grandmother’s stories about WWII and did so in The Chilbury Ladies' Choir, a bestseller.