Family

Grace & Lavender by Heather Norman Smith: Review & Giveaway

March 4, 2019 by Suzie Waltner 2 Comments

Welcome to the Blog Tour & Giveaway for Grace & Lavender by Heather Norman Smith, hosted by JustRead Publicity Tours!

ABOUT THE BOOK

Title: Grace & Lavender
Author: Heather Norman Smith
Publisher: Ambassador International
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Release Date: March 1, 2019

Recently retired Colleen Hill is always busy, constantly on a quest to make life more interesting.

When the ladies’ group at her church partners with the local children’s home, Colleen jumps in as usual, volunteering to share her passion for cooking with a troubled teenager named Grace. But Colleen must balance the new project with her pursuit of becoming a contestant on a television game show, along with all the other ideas her brain continually spins out.

Colleen’s daughter Melody is quite different. She lives a calm, simple life and is content with who she is. That is, until an unexpected opportunity to work with Grace, too, pushes her to reevaluate life and dare to take on bigger dreams. The path starts with a newly-found interest in soap-making and leads her to responsibilities she didn’t even know she wanted, including helping Grace understand the meaning of her name.

Grace & Lavender is a book for all audiences—a heart-warming story that reminds us to seek God’s purpose for our lives.

PURCHASE LINKS: Goodreads | Amazon | B&N | CBD | Book Depository

Between Before & After by Maureen Doyle McQuerry – Review

February 16, 2019 by Suzie Waltner Leave a Comment

About the Book

“The carnage began with the roses. She hacked at their ruffled blooms until they dropped into monstrous drifts of red on the parched yellow lawn … Only two things kept my mother grounded to us: my uncle Stephen and stories.”

Fourteen-year-old Molly worries about school, friends, and her parents’ failed marriage, but mostly about her mother’s growing depression. Molly knows her mother is nursing a carefully-kept secret. A writer with an obsession for other people’s life stories, Elaine Donnelly is the poster child of repressed emotions.

Molly spends her California summer alternately watching out for her little brother Angus and tip-toeing around her mother’s raw feelings. Molly needs her mother more than ever, but Elaine shuts herself off from real human connections and buries herself in the lives and deaths of the strangers she writes about. When Uncle Stephen is pressed into the limelight because of his miracle cure of a young man, Elaine can no longer hide behind other people’s stories. And as Molly digs into her mother’s past, she finds a secret hidden in her mother’s dresser that may be the key to unlocking a family mystery dating to 1918 New York—a secret that could destroy or save their future.

Amazon // B&N // BAM! // Book Depository // Christianbook // Goodreads

Taken in Texas by Susan Sleeman – Review

February 3, 2019 by Suzie Waltner Leave a Comment

The finale in Susan Sleeman’s McKade Law series is here!

About the Book

A cowboy protector from her past…

A McKade Law novel

Working her first case as deputy sheriff with her ex-boyfriend, Detective Cord Goodwin, Kendall McKade is determined to track the kidnappers—even if it makes her a target. Desperate to find the abducted victim, his aunt, Cord must keep Kendall safe…while also caring for his recently orphaned nephew. Teaming up threatens to rekindle Cord and Kendall’s relationship, but first they must solve a life-threatening mystery.

Amazon // B&N // BAM! // Christianbook // Harlequin // Goodreads

Mourning Dove by Claire Fullerton – Review & Giveaway

August 21, 2018 by Suzie Waltner 2 Comments

Welcome to the blog tour & giveaway for Mourning Dove by Claire Fullerton, hosted by JustRead Publicity Tours!

ABOUT THE BOOK

Title: Mourning Dove
Author: Claire Fullerton
Publisher: Firefly Southern Fiction
Release Date: June 29, 2018
Genre: Southern Fiction, Family Life

“An accurate and heart-wrenching picture of the sensibilities of the American South.” Kirkus Book Reviews

The heart has a home when it has an ally.

If Millie Crossan doesn’t know anything else, she knows this one truth simply because her brother Finley grew up beside her. Charismatic Finley, eighteen months her senior, becomes Millie’s guide when their mother Posey leaves their father and moves her children from Minnesota to Memphis shortly after Millie’s tenth birthday.

Memphis is a world foreign to Millie and Finley. This is the 1970s Memphis, the genteel world of their mother’s upbringing and vastly different from anything they’ve ever known. Here they are the outsiders. Here, they only have each other. And here, as the years fold over themselves, they mature in a manicured Southern culture where they learn firsthand that much of what glitters isn’t gold. Nuance, tradition, and Southern eccentrics flavor Millie and Finley’s world as they find their way to belonging.

But what hidden variables take their shared history to leave both brother and sister at such disparate ends?

PURCHASE: Goodreads | Amazon | B&N | Book Depository

A Most Noble Heir by Susan Anne Mason – Review & Giveaway

March 30, 2018 by Suzie Waltner 3 Comments

I found it interesting to read Susan Anne Mason didn’t plan on writing historical fiction. It’s a very good thing God had a different plan for her.

In My Opinion

A Most Noble Heir is a story about family. There are all sorts in a family, aren’t there? The controlling figure, the meek and quiet member who doesn’t state their opinions, the nurturers, and the mediators. I realize there are more but since these four are represented in Mason’s newest read, we’ll stop there.