A Shoe Story by Jane L. Rosen & Flying Solo by LInda Holmes

Reprinted from auburnpub.com

July is the time to kick our summer reading into high gear, and this month’s Book Report features two titles that are made for that. A Shoe Story and Flying Solo are two novels that each feature a woman looking at a very different future than she imagined. They are at a crossroads in their lives and with the help of their friends, and the possibility of romance that may or may not include reconnecting with former loves, they forge ahead.

First up is  A Shoe Story by Jane L. Rosen. Esme is excited to be graduating from college and heading off to her new life interning at an art gallery in New York City and living with Liam, her college boyfriend who also has a job in New York. 

When tragedy strikes, Esme returns her upstate New York hometown of Honeoye Falls to care for her father and all her future dreams fade away. She breaks up with Liam, not wanting to hold him back.

Seven years later, Esme has the opportunity to dog sit for a woman in New York City.  While it’s only for a month, Esme looks forward to being able to explore the city she once hoped to call home, and maybe even run into Liam.

Esme meets a handsome bartender who rescues her from a creep, and makes friends with Sy, an elderly man she meets at the dog park. She also discovers that the woman who owns the apartment has an extensive collection of beautiful shoes, and finds a note from the woman telling her to help herself (or so she thinks).

Each clever chapter title is the name of a pair of shoes from the closet, and gives the reader some idea of what it to come. (I’m not a shoe person, but if you are, you will drool over some of these descriptions and titles.)

I loved following Esme’s adventures in New York City, and made a list of all the fun places I want to visit. (Mercer Kitchen will be my first stop.) Rosen drops the reader right into Greenwich Village, with a side trip to the Hamptons. You'll feel like you are there.

A Shoe Story is a perfect summer read, with characters you want to befriend, a fantastic setting, and fancy shoes. What could be better? I highly recommend it.

Linda Holmes’ first novel, Evvie Drake Starts Over was one of my favorite books from summer of 2020, and I was pleased to hear that her second, Flying Solo publishes in June of 2022. 

Wildlife journalist Laurie Sassalyn is about to turn forty, has just broken off her engagement shortly before her wedding, and now returns to her small hometown in Maine to clean out the home of her beloved great-aunt Dot after Dot’s passing. Dot provided refuge to Laurie as a child when living with her four brothers was too noisy and overwhelming for the young girl who liked to read books in silence.

Dot was unmarried and lived a full life, traveling the world, collecting books, too many souvenirs from her travels, and boxes and boxes of Polaroid photos of friends and family. Laurie hires Matt from a service called Save the Best to provide a “bereavement decluttering”, which means he will determine what may be valuable to sell and then get rid of the rest.

Laurie finds a wooden duck decoy hidden underneath blankets in Dot’s cedar chest. She feels strangely attached to the duck, and Matt tells her he will see if could possibly be worth something, though he doubts it.

There is a mystery to be solved when the duck is stolen and Laurie, her best friend June, and former high school boyfriend-now-hot-librarian Nick team up to find out what happened and if the duck could be the product of a famous artist. 

I enjoyed the caper, sort of a grown-up Scooby-Doo mystery. Like A Shoe Story, Flying Solo has characters you want to know, and Laurie’s journey to discover if she wants to live a solo life like Dot is a unique storyline.  I liked the small town setting and getting to know the residents. I smiled at the Evvie Drake shout-out as the setting of both books are the town of Calcasset, Maine. I highly recommend Flying Solo as well. 

A Shoe Story by Jane L. Rosen- A

Published by Berkley 

Trade paperback, $17, 336 pages

Flying Solo by Linda Holmes- A

Published by Ballantine Books

Hardcover, $28, 320 pages

Friday 5ive- June 3, 2022

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly-ish post featuring five things that caught my attention this week.

Can it be June already????

1) I attended the White Mass to honor healthcare workers at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City this week. Sponsored by ArchCare, Timothy Cardinal Dolan celebrated the mass, and it was a great turnout of healthcare workers. It was an opportunity to thank the healthcare workers who were the true heroes during the pandemic, especially the early days when we really didn't know much about COVID. They went above and beyond to care for those who needed it most. Healthcare workers processed down the aisle with colorful umbrellas and that is always the most popular part of the mass.

2)  We traveled to Columbus, Ohio for our niece's high school graduation. It was a big graduating class, over 450 students. They had such beautiful music played and sung by the seniors, and we had a big family turnout for our niece Eva.

3)  The big family weekend activity (after the graduation of course) was an outing for all of us to a place called The Kitchen. It's a terrific group activity, we divided up and work at various work stations, prepping dinner for all of us to eat. We followed their recipes and chopped salad ingredients, made a dressing, made a chimmichurri sauce for filet mignon, peeled potatoes, cut broccolini, and mixed cupcake batter. The staff assisted with the actual cooking, and then we all sat down to eat. Add in the open bar with a signature cocktail and mocktail, and we all had a great time. 

The cupcake station

The prep tables

4) We're so happy to see the second season of Stanley Tucci's Searching for Italy is back on CNN. We enjoy his travels around the various regions of Italy showing us all the fantastic food we're missing. You know I took notes for our next trip to Italy. (Although the fish in Venice was not exciting to us.)

5) I read a fantastic novel, A Shoe Story by Jane L. Rosen. I'm not a 'shoe person', yet I really liked this one. After a tragedy send young Esme from a coveted post-college job opportunity at an art gallery in NYC back to her small hometown in Honeoye Falls, near Rochester, NY, the life she thought she would have disappears. Years later, she has an opportunity to dog sit for a woman in NYC, and she wonders if she can get the life  she dreamed of back. The characters are wonderful, particularly Sol, the elderly gentleman Esme befriends in the park. As someone who grew up near Rochester, I understood her upstate references, and now that I live in NYC, I jotted down all the places that Esme visited that I have yet to see. I also liked that each chapter was headed by a different show that Esme wore in that chapter-  it was so clever! A Shoe Story is a lovely story in a great setting. 

HAve a good week, stay safe and healthy.

Friday 5ive- April 29, 2022

The Friday 5ive is back after a long hiatus. I've been away on Fridays for awhile so I have a lot to cover.

1)  I had a big birthday earlier this month, and the celebrations went on for a long time and all were lovely. My kids came over for dinner, and my husband ordered a fabulous chocolate peanut butter cake from 

We Take the Cake, bakery in Miami. He said he knew I secretly loved chocolate and peanut butter, but that is not a well-kept secret- everyone who knows me is aware of that. We all loved the cake, it tasted just like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. The next night we went to dinner at Ocean's Prime and I ordered the Deviled Eggs with Caviar on top. They were delicious, and I graciously shared them with my sons and husband. 

2)  Monday night I was awakened at 3am by loud explosions. It sounded like fireworks right outside my window, and when I opened the window blinds, that is exactly what I saw. It only lasted a few minutes, and the fireworks didn't travel very high, not even above the high rise across the street. There was a lot of chatter on the Nextdoor Neighbors website, with people not believing it was fireworks, but I saw it with my own eyes, and the next day my friend sent me a photo from the street that confirmed it. So there.

3) I am so glad that in-person book events are back! On  Monday night, Adriana Trigiani was in conversation with the charming Willie Geist talking about her fabulous new novel, The Good Left Undone, at the gorgeous Rizzoli Bookstore. (My rave review of the book is here.) Willie Geist started off by saying that interviewing Adriana is like lighting the fuse on a firework- just light it and she's off. (I wonder if Willie has an alibi for later that night....) The standing room-only crowd enjoyed hearing about the wedding that Adriana crashed in Scotland that led her to write the fictional story of the Cabrelli family in Tuscany. The Cabrellis have been gem cutters and designers for generations, and Trigiani told of taking a gemology class at Christie's auction house in New York that helped with her research. 

Adriana covered a lot of ground in this freewheeling discussion and we learned so many fun facts, such as 

1) Adriana had a mad crush on Orson Wells

2) St. Bernard of Clairvaux was not a handsome man

3) Adriana didn't know you could buy Sweet & Low in a store. Her grandmother would take the packets from the restaurant tables and put them in her purse. Her grandmother passed away in 1987 and they still have Sweet & Low packets from her stash.

4) Elizabeth Taylor had size 11 shoes. You never saw her feet in any of her movies.

Yes, the evening was filled with laughs, fascinating information about the creation of The Good Left Undone, and it was so great to see so many people I haven't seen in a long time. It was like the good old days. I even got to meet author Jane L. Rosen, whose terrific novel Eliza Starts A Rumor I sent as Christmas gifts two years ago. I'm looking forward to reading her upcoming novel, A Shoe Story, publishing in June. I can't wait to go to more in-person book events in the future. 

4)  I binge-watched season two of Bridgerton on Netflix, and I have to agree with my friends- season two was better than season one! Season one was all about the sexy with the Duke and Daphne, and season two was about the slow burn romance between Anthony Bridgerton and Kate Sharma. We watched with bated breath as Anthony and Kate fought their mutual attraction as Anthony was to marry Kate's younger sister. Once again we had gorgeous costumes and jewelry (those tiaras!), beautiful scenery, and Queen Charlotte. I love how they deepened the family relationships, we really got to know the Bridgerton family and their friends and frienemies. I can't wait for season three. 

5)  I've read some terrific books. The first one is a true crime book, which is not a genre I normally read. Kathryn Miles' Trailed, about her investigation into the murders of two young women in Shenandoah National Park in 1996 had me riveted. Miles takes us through the missteps into the investigation, the arrest of a suspect whom she doesn't believe is guilty, and the lives of the two young women cut short by a brutal act. My full review is here. 

Jessica Anya Blau's novel, Mary Jane, comes out in paperback, and I loved this one. Mary Jane lives a sheltered life with her straightlaced parents in 1970s Baltimore. Mary Jane doesn't have many friends, sings in the church choir, and helps her mother cook dinner in order to learn how to be a good housewife. She gets a summer job babysitting for the precocious child of their neighbors, who are decidedly more progressive in their lifestyle. They wander around the house nearly naked, and don't cook meals for their daughter, subsisting on fast food and cereal. When a rock star and his famous singer/actress wife come to stay to be treated in secret by the father, a psychiatrist, Mary Jane is mesmerized by everything going on this household. Blau absolutely nails what it feels like to be a fourteen year-old girl in this wonderful novel, a perfect summer read. 

Next week, I'll share my visit to Boston. Stay safe and healthy all!