Category Archives: Fiction/Literature

I just finished reading the third and what was the final book in the Bottom Dollar Series by Karen Gillespie. I am hopeful that Ms. Gillespie is planning on adding new books to her series based on some comments and a contest on her website.

“Dollar Daze” is a fun and funny book that deals primarily with romance in the older set. There are sweet parts, very sad, silly, and even laugh out loud parts. We get to see Mavis and Birdie vying for the same man, Mrs. Tobias being set up with someone oh, so different from her late husband, and finally we get to touch base with Elizabeth and Timothy now that their sweet bundle of joy is born and doing what most sweet bundles of joy do – deprive Mommy and Daddy of sleep and take over their lives.

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“The One That Got Away” is an excellent debut novel by Bethany Chase. I was extremely surprised to find that the author did not have an existing back list of books as the plot, characters, and the dialog of the book were so smooth and well polished that I expected it was from long experience. As that is not the case, I was blown away by the skills shown by this new author.

The book is set in Austin, TX and as someone who lived in Austin for many years, the story sucked me right in and put me in places that I knew very well. Another expectation? I felt sure that Ms. Chase was from Austin but apparently, she actually does excellent research and has a great hand at putting the right references in the right places to make the book feel like home to me.

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“Creature Comforts” is the first book I have read by Trisha Ashley. It was so enjoyable that it will certainly not be the last. I love to find new (to me) authors who have the ability to make a story come to life. That is how I felt about this book – as if I were glancing into a slice of life of a few good friends and their families who live in the small town of Halfhidden.

The book is a little bit romance, literary fiction, and mystery all rolled into one. Our main protagonist is Izzy – the rest of the story revolves around her. Izzy is back home to start a new clothing business that she has dreamed of and planned for years. She was also involved in a fatal car accident years before and, while she was held at fault, has no memory of what occurred. She is at a cross roads in her romantic life as she confronts whether or not she is still in love with the man she has been engaged to for years.

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“Postcards from the Past” is the first Marcia Willet novel that I have read. It is always a real pleasure to find a “new” author who turns out to be an incredibly established one with a huge back list of books for me to enjoy.

The characters in this book seem to have stepped into the book from real life. With Ms. Willet’s excellent ability to describe people and places and to put real words into the mouths of her characters, I felt very quickly as if these were people I knew and cared about. The story is primarily about a middle-aged set of siblings, their kind of relation Dom, and a shadowy figure from their past. The past is woven into the present as the book unfolds and we get to know each of these individuals a little better chapter by chapter. With each, we see some good and some not so good parts of their character.

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This is the story of two sisters who were raised in Cayboo Creek. Chiffon was the beauty queen, with a mother who drug her around the pageant route. Her sister Chenille as the studious one – not quite pageant material – but pushed to be top dog in the academic contests. They have grown apart and see each other seldom though they live not too many hours away from each other.

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I loved this book. I live in the South and while, to a degree, the individuals in this book were a bit over the top, they are completely based on types of people you can run into every day. They made me laugh but still warmed my heart as it was obvious that they cared deeply about one another.

While the story is centered around Elizabeth Polk, her friends and family in Cayboo Creek were a great part of why I enjoyed the book. From finding Atalee’s dentures in different places in the store to Taffy’s incessant desire to be “high class” without understanding exactly what that means, I was kept laughing throughout the book. Even the blurbs at the beginning of each title were hysterical and a source of fun to share with my husband.

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“Sisters of Shiloh” is a very interesting book about two sisters who disguise themselves as men to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The book has some fairly gruesome descriptions of battle scenes. It was more than I expected; however, it absolutely conveyed the horrific loss of life that happens during war.

Libby, the younger of the two sisters, goes slightly off-balance mentally after her husband is killed by the Yankees. She decides the way to avenge his death is to go to war in his place. When Josephine, the older sister, is unable to convince her not to go, Josephine follows her. While on the face of it, this seems far-fetched, it turns out that a good number of women actually did fight in the war disguised as men.

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