I have two for you today. I read them back-to-back, and still keep thinking of them as a pair, somehow.

How the Story Goes is so much more than a love story. It is a book that will resonate with the reader who wants not just romance but a story with weight, with intelligence, with a kind of emotional depth that lingers long after the final page. I keep thinking about this book. And I will definitely re-read it.

At its center is Whit Longacre, a widower still navigating the disorienting landscape of grief, raising his young daughter while carrying the impossible responsibility his late wife has left behind: to finish her beloved children’s fantasy series. His wife wrote books beloved on the level of Harry Potter. He is not that kind of writer. He’s good, but a different and much less celebrated kind of good. And he doesn’t exactly understand her books the way a superfan would. Enter Merritt Pryor, a bookstore employee and former MFA student whose own relationship with writing has been fractured by failure and regret. She is the superfan. What unfolds between them is at first a partnership—creative, intellectual, and deeply human. But you know where this is going, right?

There is something here that feels reminiscent of an earlier kind of romantic storytelling—maybe an echo of Nora Ephron—where conversation matters, where ideas matter, where the connection between two people is built as much on shared thought as on attraction. The romance is tender and slow, the chemistry unmistakable but never overplayed, and the emotional stakes are grounded not in spectacle but in the quiet, often messy work of becoming.

What makes this novel stand out, though, is its balance. It moves gracefully between grief and hope, between ambition and uncertainty, between the structure of a well-plotted story and the unpredictability of real human feeling. The writing itself reflects that balance: sharp and thoughtful, but never showy; intimate without becoming claustrophobic or voyeuristic; confident enough to trust the reader to sit with what is unsaid.

The premise—a writer tasked with completing another’s unfinished story—could easily have tipped into contrivance. Instead, it becomes something richer: a meditation on authorship, on legacy, on what it means to carry someone else’s voice forward without losing your own. The collaboration between Whit and Merritt is as compelling as any romance, precisely because it asks them both to risk something—to return to the page, to their own desires, to the possibility of connection.

The character development is especially satisfying. Nothing feels forced. Relationships shift not because the plot demands it, but because the characters themselves are changing, slowly and convincingly, under the weight of their circumstances and their choices. It is, in the truest sense, a character-driven novel—one in which the people are the story.

And the ending… it is not tidy. It is, instead, slightly bittersweet, the kind that requires you to sit with it for a while, to turn it over in your mind before deciding how you feel. But that, it seems to me, is the mark of a story that respects its reader. It does not rush to resolve every tension or soften every edge. It allows the complexity to remain.

There is also, woven throughout, a deep love for books themselves—for the act of reading, for the life of the mind, for the way stories shape us and stay with us. It is the sort of novel that reminds you why you fell in love with reading in the first place.

If you are looking for a romance that offers more than charm—one with substance, with heft, with genuine emotional intelligence—this is well worth your time. It is warm without being sentimental, thoughtful without being too terribly heavy, and full of the kind of lived-in humanity that makes a story feel true.

Is it clean? Yes, it’s a closed-door romance. There’s no smut here. There’s a little realistic language for which the author writes in his acknowledgments, “Also sorry, Mom, for the bad words.” That sweet line just so perfectly sums up, to me, how he approached his writing — his art. His heart shines through these pages, and it feels like he’s someone you want to know.

I closed it with that rare sense of satisfaction that comes from having been both entertained and, in some small way, understood. I know I will remember these characters for some time to come... (For this one, I thank NetGalley and Avon for a review copy.)

But, wait, there’s more:-)

Reading this book made me more curious about a book that I’d heard mentioned a lot this year. Like How the Story Goes, it is also a bookish book about books. Where How the Story Goes offered some fun fictional insight into the writing process, This Book Made Me Think of You has a main character in the publishing business.

Both books are about navigating grief when a spouse dies.

And I loved them both so, so much.

In This Book Made Me Think of You, after her husband’s death, Tilly Nightingale is left moving through her days sort of suspended—she’s untethered, uncertain, and far from the woman she once was. So when she receives word that a birthday gift from him is waiting at her local bookshop, the news feels impossible. Joe has been dead for five months.

The gift, it turns out, is not a single offering but a carefully imagined year: twelve books, one for each month, each accompanied by a letter written in Joe’s hand before he died. Together, they form a kind of map—an invitation to step, slowly and imperfectly, into life again. Joe is very much a character in this book, even though he’s no longer living. He is tender and goodhearted, and he takes care of her in a way that is wholly memorable. What a good, good husband!

At first, Tilly resists. Previously a voracious reader, after his death, reading feels like something that belonged to another version of herself, a woman who had time for stories and space for imagination. I totally identified with this. I had a really hard time going back to fiction for years after I had cancer. But Joe’s letters draw her in, and with each book she finds herself not only entering new worlds on the page, but beginning—almost without realizing it—to reenter her own.

Her monthly visits to the bookshop, and her growing connection with its gentle, perceptive owner (who helped curate Joe’s list), offer a soft place to land. Meanwhile, the stories and nonfiction she reads begin to shape her choices, nudging her toward experiences she might once have avoided. What begins as a private act of remembrance slowly becomes something more expansive: a reawakening, a reimagining, and, ultimately, a return to love in its many forms.

I won’t walk you through every turn of the story, but this is what Libby Page does with such quiet confidence: she refuses to hurry Tilly past her grief. Joe is not tucked neatly into the past so the “real” story can begin. There’s a temptation, especially in novels that promise romance, to press forward toward the next bright moment, to treat sorrow as a brief prelude rather than a landscape to be inhabited. Page resists that entirely. She allows us to remain with Tilly through the long, uneven work of mourning, as each book and each letter becomes less an escape than a companion, gently guiding her toward a life she must learn to imagine again.

Romance does find its way into the story, but it does not dominate it, and that restraint is so appreciated given the context of Tilly’s life. The emotional center remains Tilly’s slow reawakening—her tentative steps back into the world, her willingness to be shaped by both memory and possibility.

That said, for readers who come hoping for a love story, there is one here, and it is rendered with such tenderness that it feels entirely right. The sweetness unfolds gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, and by the time it comes into full view, it carries a warmth that lingers long after you finish the novel. He is endearing. Their tentative steps towards one another don’t overshadow the deeper work of the novel; instead, they complete it, like the final note in a piece of music that resolves everything that came before.

I purchased this book twice: once on audio (which was well done) and once in hardcover because the booklists that go with every month are worth owning so that I can refer to them again and again. And also, I just really, really love the cover! (Mine is the bright blue one with the book spines.)

All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in color, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colors of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.

She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light.

― The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

Last night, the Take Up Membership met for Our Little Book Club. This morning, I endeavored to capture that conversation and pull together a review for you. It was important to me to get this done today.

Because, of course, this is the last day of April, and I like it when things are in order that way.

This delightfully quirky book begins as if it were about two women chafing against their ordinary lives. The days are filled, the duties faithfully discharged, the relationships rickety but mostly intact, and yet beneath it all runs a thin, persistent ache. Neither have drastic situations that are quite dramatic enough to justify upheaval. The casual onlooker might not even see difficulties enough to invite sympathy. But their sorrow is real.

It is into precisely these lives—theirs and maybe ours too—that The Enchanted April arrives as a door left ajar to something fully wondrous.

When Lotty Wilkins first sees the advertisement for a medieval Italian castle to rent in April, something in her stirs that she does not fully understand. It is not a plan, but it is a vision. (We discover she is prone to such visions.) It is a blurry recognition—an awareness that life might be lived differently, that beauty might not be an occasional indulgence but an atmosphere in which to live for an entire month.

The novel’s first insistence is that before there is transformation, there must be permission. So, the four women who are to be transformed gather around an improbable plan to spend a month in a castle in Italy. They are respectable, settled women in England after the First World War. They are steadfast and persevering. Yet each one, in her own way, has been living at a distance from her own life. Each of them has a very well-buried sense of inauthenticity. Each of them is unaware that she desperately needs to change in order to truly come alive.

Elizabeth von Arnim understands something essential here.

When they arrive, something nearly magical happens. The castle in Italy does not solve all their problems. That fragile yes turns into a “Heck yes!” And the atmosphere begins to reveal the root of their problems by removing what has numbed their capacity to feel. The Italian countryside in April does what we do in coaching when we peek under the top layer emotion to find what is beneath. They enter into what is truly authentic in order to become who they were created to be.

In London, the women have adapted to the constraints of the society they live in. In Italy, they encounter abundance. Light spills across terraces. Wisteria drapes itself in extravagant cascades. The air itself seems to invite expansion. The atmosphere insists that they gulp deep breaths of springtime air in order to be born into something new and altogether better than what they left behind.

The place itself is formative.

We tend to imagine that beauty is optional, a kind of adornment layered on top of real life. But in this novel, beauty acts as a teacher. It calls forth receptivity. It disrupts the habit of self-protection. It invites the women to lay down, even briefly, the vigilance that has governed their inner lives.

What emerges is not a new self, but a renovated one.

Living for a whole month in a place that she frequently calls “heaven,” Lotty Wilkens is the first to let beauty open her to charity. She is eager to fully absorb what is beautiful and also to share it without reservation.

What distinguishes Mrs. Wilkins from the very beginning is not intelligence, wit, or social ease. She is straight-up awkward. But the childlike (not childish) quality of her heart drives the novel. She becomes, without intending it, the novel’s clearest embodiment of love—of that rare combination of understanding and acceptance that does not first pause to evaluate whether it is warranted or what she can gain from it. Where others measure, she moves toward.

She does not persuade or instruct. She does not analyze the dynamics of the group. She simply responds to the world—and to the people in it—with an openness that feels almost reckless.

Lotty delights without apology. She receives beauty without suspicion. She extends affection without first calculating its safety.

From the moment she arrives at San Salvatore, she is overtaken by what the author calls “a great desire to love and be friends with everybody.” It is not strategic. It is not self-conscious. She doesn’t want to love everybody in order to get something from them. It is, rather, the natural expression of a soul that has not trained itself to withhold abundant, overflowing love.

From that way of being, Lady Caroline’s studied indifference does not register as an offense. Mrs. Fisher’s imperious tone fails to provoke resistance. Where Rose Arbuthnot feels the sting of both women’s behavior and instinctively recoils, Mrs. Wilkins does something far more difficult: she interprets. She seeks first to understand. She softens her heart towards theirs.

She urges Rose to consider that they do not yet know these women, that unfamiliarity invites patience rather than judgment. It is a small shift, but a decisive one. Instead of allowing first impressions to harden into conclusions, she leaves space—space in which another person might yet be seen differently.

This same generosity extends, crucially, to her husband, the very man she was eager to escape because he annoyed her so. Mellersh has long occupied the position of superiority, his condescension so habitual that it has become their standard way of relating. Yet, in that beautiful, glorious place, Mrs. Wilkins does not dwell on the accumulated grievances. She wants to reach out to him in order to share the beauty. She writes to him with the same expansive charity she offers the others, and in doing so alters the dynamic between them. He finds himself, perhaps for the first time, responding not to defensiveness or quiet diminishment, but to warmth. And he changes. The change comes not from her manipulation or correction, but from Mellersh’s encountering a version of his wife who is no longer constricted by his poor opinion of her. Lotty let go of her own hurt and offense and just loved him.

It is this posture that awakens something in Mrs. Arbuthnot as well. Watching Lotty, she begins to suspect that the love she once shared with her husband Frederick has not disappeared so much as been buried beneath layers of injury and rigid sanctimoniousness. Her religion (the author uses the word “religion” and not faith, and I think that’s important) has grown severe, distancing her from the very charity it professes. She recognizes, with a kind of painful clarity, that she has extended more tenderness to strangers in need than to the man to whom she is married.

Rose Arbuthnot is so offended and embarrassed by her husband’s profession that she can barely stand to be in the same room with him. He is the author of steamy fictional memoirs of the mistresses of long-dead kings. She is mortified that this is the work that pays her bills. Under the spell of the castle, she does a good deal of interior work. She begins tentatively to practice a different kind of attention—one that allows for forgiveness not as abstraction but as lived reality. And as her posture softens, so too does her attitude towards the relationship. Through events that require a bit of willful suspension of disbelief, she and Frederick find their way back to one another, not by erasing what has been difficult, but by choosing again the love that first brought them together.

This same movement towards pure charity unfolds in other ways among the other women. Mrs. Fisher and Lady Caroline arrive with no intention of friendship. Each has already formed her judgment. Mrs. Fisher disdains what she sees as the affectations of youth; Lady Caroline recoils from what she perceives as dryness and intrusion. Their mutual aversion is swift and decisive.

And yet, something in the atmosphere of San Salvatore begins to work upon them. The novel’s image of ripening—“like fruit by the beneficent sun”—is not accidental. It suggests a process that is both natural and gradual, requiring no force, only exposure. Beauty plays its part, certainly. But so does the presence of Mrs. Wilkins, whose lack of defensiveness proves unexpectedly disarming. Lotty extends herself—seemingly effortlessly—to be a genuinely good friend to two women who deliberately give off “don’t befriend me” vibes.

Acceptance, when it is genuine, has a way of loosening what is tightly held. Lady Caroline, accustomed to being admired for her great beauty, finds herself drawn into a friendship that is neither performative nor possessive. Mrs. Fisher, long entrenched in her habits of frosty judgment, discovers—almost to her own surprise—that she is capable of warm delight.

In each case, transformation does not begin with an inward resolution to change. It begins with being received differently than one expects. Kindness precedes self-reflection. Acceptance makes room for growth.

As the days unfold, something begins to shift among the women. Their interactions lose their edge. Old reflexes of comparison and defensiveness begin to soften. There is, in their shared life, the emergence of something that feels remarkably rare: an environment shaped not by calculation, but by generosity.

It would be easy to sentimentalize this, but von Arnim does something more interesting. She allows us to see that what has changed is not merely mood, but orientation.

For a time, at least, the women begin to love without measuring.

And this is perhaps the novel’s most enduring insight. We are accustomed to thinking that change originates within, that we must first decide, exert, and improve. The Enchanted April offers another possibility: that we are often changed by the quality of love extended toward us, and that in learning to offer that love to others, we participate in their becoming the people that the Creator intended—and we become our authentic selves as well.

There are moments in the novel when the castle feels less like a setting and more like a revelation—a glimpse of the beauty of what human life could be if charity were not perpetually obstructed by fear or pride. It would not be perfected, of course. It is still human, and despite Lotty’s exclamations, the place is not heaven. But I think we are asked to take a look at what might be if we lived in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. It is a different way of being even than “in the world but not of the world.” In this setting, the world is an accomplice in endeavoring to live a holy life. We don’t have to swim against the tide of the world. The tide carries us.

And so this book brings the reader into a setting that is a foretaste of heaven—not as abstraction, but as a living, breathing place in which love is freely given, freely received, and no longer selfishly rationed.

The means are disarmingly ordinary: time, beauty, rest, and the presence of others who are willing, however imperfectly, to lay down their defenses.

Today, on this last day of April, we can still unwrap the novel’s enduring gift.

It does not promise that life will become easier if one simply seeks beauty or practices generosity. The change of place gave birth to a change of perspective. But spring is happening outside almost everyone’s own doors right now. The fictional transformations suggest something both more modest and more profound than a new life birthed by a trip to the Italian countryside: that the quality of one’s life is deeply connected to the quality of one’s thoughts, and that one’s thoughts can be renewed right here where you live today.

The question it leaves us with is not whether we can replicate the exact conditions of an Italian spring, but whether we are willing to notice where life is already inviting us into greater abundance.

Where have we settled for endurance when something more is possible?

Where have we made demands when extending graciousness would be more healing?

Where have we closed ourselves to beauty, to relationship, to the risk of loving without guarantees?

And where, even now, might we begin again—not by rearranging the entire structure of our lives, but by allowing a little more light to enter them?

The answers may not transport us to a castle above the Ligurian Sea. But they may, if we are willing, lead us toward something just as rare: a life that feels, once again, authentically inhabited from within.

This article was created after a Take Up & Live book club meeting. We had a lively chat together, and I can’t begin to capture it here. Our next book is Theo of Golden. You can access the full replay of this session in the Take Up & Read membership. It is in the archives along with numerous coaching workshops, bible studies, and book chats. Come join us.

As I continue to settle into Substack, I am intrigued by the chat feature. It’s been a minute since I've chatted online in a forum setting. I’m not even sure how it works on Substack. But I do have something that makes me want to open up the conversation. So, let’s try our first chat, shall we?

After our Zoom discussion of The Frozen River officially ended on Saturday morning, we settled into a new conversation. It was lively and thoughtful, and actually, more thought-provoking than settling.

Earlier in the week, someone had reached out to me privately, wondering whether parts of the book might offend some of the women in our group. The question wasn’t accusatory. It was protective and thoughtful. It carried a sweet, quiet pastoral instinct — the desire to ensure no one is blindsided or unnecessarily wounded.

And that concern lingered in the air as we began to talk.

What surprised me was how differently we experienced the same book. Some readers did not consider it “spicy” at all. Others did. Not dramatically or defensively. Simply honestly.

And I realized that we don’t even share a common definition of that word.

For some, the presence of any sexual description — even if it’s an innuendo, even within a loving marriage — crosses into territory that feels “too much.” For others, “spicy” implies something written to arouse, something that uses sensuality as a draw. Then there are other things to consider. A violent assault scene reads very differently from marital affection. One is grievous and unsettling. The other may be intimate but not titillating. Yet both involve sexuality on the page.

What struck me most was how personal these thresholds are. They are shaped by age, by experience, by one’s marriage, by one’s past wounds, by temperament. None of us read from a neutral place. We bring our whole histories into the story with us.

There was no rush to build a rating system, though I have certainly toyed with the idea. Instead, what surfaced was something deeper and more important: the question of formation.

Not whether a book contains sexual content, but what it asks us to do with it.

Is it glamorizing something destructive?
Is it presenting brokenness with moral clarity?
Is it inviting us to dwell in desire for its own sake?
Or is it asking us to witness the truth about human frailty and power?

In The Frozen River, the most graphic sexual scene is an assault. It is painful. It is not meant to arouse. It exposes injustice. It draws the reader in and creates empathy. At the same time, the novel portrays a long marriage that includes embodied tenderness. That, too, is honest. Marriage is not sterile. It is physical. It is affectionate. It is lived in bodies.

Some readers experienced those scenes simply as part of a historical narrative intended for mature audiences. Others felt the intensity more keenly.

Neither reaction was wrong.

What mattered was the posture with which we approached the conversation. No one mocked another’s sensitivity. No one dismissed another’s comfort level. We listened. We acknowledged that discernment looks different at different seasons of life and for different people.

I found myself thinking afterward that the word “spice” may be too blunt an instrument for what we are really trying to navigate. It reduces complex moral and artistic questions to a sliding scale, when what we are actually wrestling with is formation.

Stories shape imagination. Imagination shapes expectation. And expectation quietly shapes the way we see our own lives.

That doesn’t mean we retreat to sanitized fiction that refuses to grapple with sin. If anything, we were united in our weariness with stories that smooth over the grit of real human experience. Faith is not strengthened by pretending the world is tidy.

But there is a difference between depicting brokenness and celebrating it. There is a difference between honesty and indulgence.

I left that conversation grateful — not because we solved anything, but because we modeled something. A group of women reading seriously, speaking candidly, and allowing room for one another’s conscience.

That feels far more important than assigning chili peppers to a book jacket.

It feels like the work of growing up as readers — and as women of faith.

But still… we need a way to convey to readers what is inside so that they may make prudent choices according to their own preferences.

This feels like a conversation that doesn’t belong in a comment box so much as around a table.

I’ve opened a chat on Substack where we can continue talking about how we read, what forms us, and how we discern wisely.
If you’re subscribed, you’ll see it there. I’d love to hear how you think about these things.

There is something bracing about a novel that opens with a frozen river and a dead man trapped beneath the ice. But what lingers after reading The Frozen River is not the body in the Kennebec.

It is the woman called to bear witness.

Martha Ballard is not written as a modern heroine awkwardly dressed in eighteenth-century costume. She’s a richly drawn character who is anchored to her time and yet startlingly relevant. A midwife, a wife, a mother, and an unflinching witness to injustice, she occupies that narrow space historically allotted to women—then quietly expands it.

In our book club conversation, what struck us most was her competence. Not competence in the thin, feminist, contemporary sense of “strong female character,” but competence rooted in vocation. Martha knows her work. (The real-life Martha Ballard delivered babies in 18th-century Maine—she never lost a mother. Ever. How extraordinary is that?!)

She knows women’s bodies. She knows the rhythms of birth and death. She knows her community. She knows her family. And she writes it all down. The writing of it all is truly extraordinary for a woman in her time, and it has given us the gift of the authentic journals upon which this fictional story is built.

The diary—steady, factual, observant—becomes a moral compass and an act of moral resistance. In a world where a woman’s testimony is easily dismissed, ink is a ballast.

We talked at length about the marriage at the center of the novel.

In a story that could have leaned heavily into courtroom drama or scandal, Lawhon also gives us something surprisingly tender: a long marriage marked by mutual respect and tenderness. Ephraim is not perfect, and neither is Martha, of course. But it is a beautiful marriage. They argue. They carry wounds. But their loyalty to one another feels deep and true, lived-in and ordinary, in the best ways. There is physical affection between them, but it is never gratuitous. It reads as the natural language of a couple who have weathered decades together.

In an era saturated with stories of betrayal and marital collapse, it was refreshing to encounter a narrative where a husband does not diminish his wife’s intelligence and a wife does not undermine her husband’s dignity. Their partnership is not flashy; it is faithful.

Martha herself is not sainted. She can be sharp. She withholds care from another woman in a moment that exposes her own flawed judgment. She is capable of pride. Yet those flaws make her steadiness more compelling. She is not fighting injustice because she is flawless; she is fighting it because she believes truth matters, and she believes in leaning into living virtuously.

The novel’s central crime—a horrific rape months before the frozen death—gives the book its moral gravity. It is handled soberly, without titillation. There is a graphic description of violence that is not aestheticized. The fictionalized crime is grievous.

But the author’s note lets us know that Lawhon held back—the real crime was even more heinous. This is not gratuitous violence. The distinction matters. Lawhon is not interested in arousal; she is interested in revealing power—who holds it, who abuses it, and who dares to challenge it.

The historical setting amplifies the tension. This is 1789 Puritan Maine. The country is young. Legal systems are fragile. Reputation is currency. For Martha to insist upon truth, particularly when respected men are implicated, requires not just courage but sacrifice. The cost is both relational and communal. Even her role as midwife—in a place where she is both desperately needed and widely respected— is at risk.

I was hesitant to read this book. I never would have read it based on the description. Actually, a review like this would have dissuaded me, to be honest. I’m so glad a trusted friend recommended it, but even after I bought it and intended to read it, I didn’t pick it up. My tipping point into actually reading the novel was when my friend told me that inside those covers was the story of a beautiful marriage.

I’m so glad I made myself read it.

Despite the grave realities of the subject matter, the novel is not bleak. It is tense, yes. But it is also deeply human. There are births alongside burials. Bread baked. Children squabbling. Snow falling. The ordinary life of a town moving forward despite its scars.

What lingers most for me is the portrait of a woman who understood that bearing witness is holy work. Martha Ballard did not set out to be extraordinary. She set out to do her job faithfully. That faithfulness—repeated daily, recorded meticulously—becomes revolutionary.

In a literary landscape quick to celebrate spectacle, The Frozen River quietly honors steadfastness.

And that, perhaps, is why it stays with you long after the ice has thawed.

I switched back and forth between the Kindle and Audible versions. The audio is superbly done!

All our Book Club conversations are open to Take Up & Read Members. They receive links to join in live and have actual conversations. And the recordings are available in the archives as well.

Perfection.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to read the perfect introduction to the cozy mystery genre.

I don’t think I’ve read a mystery since my Nancy Drew days. While I was a devoted fan of Nancy, adult mysteries really aren’t my jam. I just don’t need anything else in my life to make me anxious—even for a chapter. So I really didn’t understand how there could be such a thing as a “cozy mystery.” But I love Melissa Ferguson’s romances, and I didn’t want to let a book of hers go unread. So I was delighted when I was provided both audio and ebook by NetGalley.

Before I get to the book, though, let’s digress a minute. What is a cozy mystery?

A cozy mystery is a story that invites you in rather than startles you awake.

It is a mystery where the danger is real, but it never feels lawless. The world remains intact—order disturbed, but not destroyed. Someone has died, yes, but the story unfolds in a place where goodness still has roots: a small town with a bakery that smells like cinnamon, a bookshop with uneven wooden floors, a seaside village where everyone knows everyone else’s dog.

The detective is rarely a detective by trade. She is a librarian, or a gardener, or a personal assistant on a cruise ship. She notices things. She listens. She cares. Her investigation grows not out of ambition, but out of loyalty—to a friend, to the truth, to the quiet conviction that wrongs should be made right.

The violence happens offstage. What matters most is not the shock of the crime, but the restoration that follows. A cozy mystery is less interested in darkness for its own sake than in the gentle work of bringing light back to a community that has briefly lost its footing.

There is almost always warmth threaded through it—friendship, humor, the promise of tea poured into a real cup. Often, there is love. Not grand, sweeping declarations, but the steady, surprising realization that someone has been standing beside you all along.

In the end, a cozy mystery offers reassurance: that even when something breaks the peace, attention and courage and care can mend it. And that the world, though shaken, is still a place where truth can be found and people can come home.

I guess I’m a newly minted cozy mystery fan. Melissa Ferguson—whose romances are delightful—has sold me on the genre.

Other reviewers have said they knew the ending from the beginning. Not me. I didn’t figure it out. Maybe it’s because I’m a mystery newbie, but it wasn’t predictable for me. And I found the ending entirely satisfying.

Pip is a brilliant and super-efficient personal assistant to Hugh and The Magnificent Seven, a group of authors, all from different genres, who are all very successful. On a convention for their readers on a cruise ship, Hugh turns up dead on day two. The ship’s security is terrible at best, so Pip decides to conduct her own investigation. Nash, one of the only younger authors, is there to protect her and to sleuth with her. It’s not just a mystery. There’s definitely a love story here, too. I do wish we’d gotten to see more of their history together as well as as dig deeper into who they are to one another. Maybe a sequel?

In this story, Pip is newly split from a bad relationship and very much a doubter of herself. She grows more confident, but she also leans into a budding talent that was there all along.

It was a joy to gain insight to writing process and all the things that support writers. Ferguson’s prose is expertly crafted. So many romance books are “lit lite,” and the language is a little lazy. Not hers. She treats these stories as if they are worthy of only the highest quality turns of phrase.

The group of writers was a mix of over-the-top personalities. And there was wisdom in the group that came with age. That’s kind of a fresh approach in the rom-com genre, too. The roles of people who were old enough to be grandparents weren’t feeble dearheart roles. They had something to offer.

The bookish bunch on a bookish cruise--just so fun!

Also, while I mostly read this in print, the audio was really well done. Highly recommend.

*Thank you to Netgalley and to Thomas Nelson Fiction. I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.*

I want to preface this review with some thoughts about rating books. For an exceedingly long time, I’ve avoided reviewing books because I didn’t want to rate them. I mean, how can you assign a number to someone’s hard work? Then I signed on to receive review copies, and rating is part of the deal. So I needed some sort of system.

Five stars are reserved for books I really have no quibbles with at all. I loved them. Four stars are for books I’d pass on to a friend because they’re worth the time and effort. Three stars are books that didn’t do much for me, but aren’t bad. Two stars are books I wish I hadn’t bothered to finish (and wouldn’t have finished unless I’d promised a review).

The other component I want to address in books is the “spice” level. I don’t really have a numerical system for this, but I’ll warn you if I bumped into it. Sometimes, I’m surprised by it while reviewing a book that didn’t seem like it would be at all “spicy.” I’m not seeking spice, but sometimes spice unexpectedly happens.

Levels of sexual content only affect the star rating if sex gets in the way of the story. Put another way, there is no chance I’m going to tell you how well an author described sex. If I hit those scenes, I skim over them; I don’t critique them. And so, that writing isn’t rated. What will be rated is gratuitous sex—writing sex into a book just so sex can sell the book. When that happens, I promise the rating is adversely affected. And that is what happened with this book.

The Cherry Crush Flower Shop had so many elements I should have loved. But the sex wrecked it.

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Releases February 3!

This one is so beautifully aligned with the questions I am already exploring in my own writing — the cost of divided loyalties, the mythology children construct about their parents, the quiet fracture lines in marriage that only appear years later.

It was lovely to recognize themes in another story altogether.

Family Drama is one of those novels that opens with a scene so startling you feel slightly winded — and then you realize the book is not about shock at all. It’s about what remains.

It’s 1997. Snow falls over a New England beach while two seven-year-olds watch their mother’s body tipped from a crumbling boat in a Viking funeral. A theatrical exit for Susan Bliss — soap opera star, dreamer, divided woman.

But this isn’t a mystery about how she dies. We know from the beginning that Susan is gone. What Fallon is interested in is something far more intricate: what it means for children to grow up in the shadow of a mother who was always partly elsewhere.

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Volume 1: Ashes, Agency, and the Beginning of Reckoning

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I remember one Christmas when I was around ten. I woke before everyone else, went to see all the goodness under the tree, and delighted in the small stack of books my mother had left unwrapped (UNWRAPPED!) on the top of my pile. I still don’t know why they didn’t get wrapped. Maybe she ran out of wrapping paper? But there they were. And at 5 AM, without bothering a soul, I settled in to begin reading. I was halfway through the first novel before everyone else was ready to unwrap presents.

I still start my day around 5 AM with reading:-).

In the Take Up Membership, we have a little book club. We meet about once a month and have a Saturday morning chat about a book. We began last summer, and since then, we’ve talked about these books. Since books make truly wonderful last-minute gifts (maybe for yourself?), and these were all gift-worthy, this seems like a good time to review them.

The Dearly Beloved is a moving historical novel by American author Cara Wall that gently traces the intertwined lives of two couples—Charles and Lily Barrett, and James and Nan MacNally—across seventeen transformative years in 1950s and 1960s America. Through seasons of joy and sorrow, the novel explores what it means to live faithfully, to love imperfectly, and to keep searching for meaning in the midst of ordinary life and unexpected hardship.

Drawing on her own background in Presbyterian church life and her understanding of autism, Wall approaches complex and deeply human questions with care and honesty. Central themes include faith and doubt, the ways personal beliefs shape relationships, and the longing for purpose that runs quietly beneath everyday choices.

A gentle note to readers: The novel—and any discussion of it—touches on difficult topics, including pregnancy loss, illegal abortion, sexual harassment and assault, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol addiction, depression, and outdated approaches to autism treatment, including institutionalization. The language used to describe autism reflects the historical setting and includes terminology that is now understood to be offensive and outdated.

Hannah Coulter, published in 2004, is the seventh novel in Wendell Berry’s beloved Port William series. Told in the quiet, reflective voice of Hannah herself as she looks back in the final season of her life, the story unfolds in the small farming community of Port William, Kentucky. With tenderness and clarity, Hannah tells her life story—from the years just after World War I all the way into the new millennium.

Through her memories, we witness a life shaped by love, loss, steady work, and deep attachment to land and community. At the heart of the novel is Hannah’s fifty-year marriage to her husband Nathan, along with the family and farm they patiently built together. Woven throughout are timeless themes of place and belonging, the power of memory and storytelling, and the enduring values of rural and agrarian life.

Through Hannah’s personal journey, Berry gently invites readers to consider what it truly means to belong—to a place, to a people, and to a shared way of life. At the same time, he traces the quiet ache of change as rural communities are reshaped by post-war modernization and the mechanization of farming. The result is a deeply human story that honors fidelity, rootedness, and the sacredness of ordinary life.

I first read this one over a decade ago. It hit differently this year. Definitely still pondering. Note: This is one of the rare times the audio is improved by speeding it up a little.

The Shell Seekers, published in 1987 by Rosamunde Pilcher, became the novel that introduced her to a wide and devoted audience. The story was inspired by a heartfelt conversation with her editor at St. Martin’s Press about her children’s hope that their mother might one day become famous. In response, Pilcher set out to write a novel especially for women—one shaped by the lived experiences, long memories, and quiet strength of her own generation.

I adore this book!

Set in 1984, but woven together with memories, the novel centers on Penelope Stern Keeling and her three adult children—Nancy, Olivia, and Noel. As Penelope reflects on her life, the lasting imprint of World War II comes into view, revealing the way love, sacrifice, and loss quietly shaped her story. At the same time, the question of inheritance begins to stir old tensions, bringing both the most difficult and the most generous parts of her children’s hearts into the light.

The Shell Seekers was later adapted for the screen, first as a film starring Angela Lansbury in 1989 and later as a television miniseries featuring Vanessa Redgrave in 2006, presumably to allow new generations to encounter Penelope’s story of art, memory, family, and enduring love. Some younger readers I know shy away from the length of this book;-). I don’t understand that at all. To me, it’s a long, luxurious soak in excellent prose, and I didn’t want it to ever end. I have not seen either the movie or the miniseries. I love the book so much I’m afraid they might wreck it for me. This is also one that hit differently on the re-read.

Persuasion is the last novel completed by Jane Austen, written between 1815 and 1816 and published after her death. Set in the gentle rhythms of the Regency era, the novel follows the engagements, hopes, and heartaches of a small circle of middle-class families, with particular tenderness toward the inner lives and social realities of women.

At its center is a love story marked by regret, patience, and quiet endurance. True to themes found throughout Austen’s work, the romantic leads must first face their own pride and past mistakes before they can fully understand what they still mean to one another. Persuasion is often cherished as one of the most emotionally mature of Austen’s novels—less sparkling in satire than some of her earlier works, but deeply moving in its portrayal of steady love and hard-won wisdom.

My daughter Karoline suggested this one for our book club because the “second chance trope” is my favorite. At heart, Persuasion is a classic “second-chance” romance—a tale of two people who once loved, were separated by painful choices, and are given a rare opportunity to begin again. It is a story shaped by personal growth, humility, forgiveness, and the quiet power of love renewed.

A Man Called Ove, published in 2012 by Swedish author Fredrik Backman, is a tender, quietly humorous novel about love, loss, and the surprising ways community can save us. The story centers on Ove, a gruff, rigid, and seemingly unapproachable man whose orderly world has been shattered by grief after the death of his beloved wife. Set in a small neighborhood where everyone seems to know everyone else’s business, the novel unfolds as Ove’s carefully guarded solitude is slowly—and persistently—interrupted by the messy needs of other people.

Through a series of present-day encounters and poignant flashbacks, readers come to know the deep love that shaped Ove’s life and the heartbreak that now defines it. What begins as a story about loneliness slowly becomes a story about connection, as unlikely friendships begin to grow and Ove discovers, despite himself, that he still belongs to the living world.

With warmth, empathy, and gentle wit, Backman explores themes of grief and healing, the dignity of ordinary lives, and the saving power of neighborly love. A Man Called Ove reminds us that even the most closed-off hearts are shaped by love—and that it is never too late to be drawn back into the circle of human connection. I admit that I was slow to warm up to this one. But our discussion of it was so good that by the time we finished talking, I had a deepened genuine appreciation for it.

At the very end of this Christmas season (early January), we’ll meet to talk about Niall Williams’ Time of the Child.

Time of the Child is a luminous work of literary fiction by Irish novelist Niall Williams, set in his beloved fictional village of Faha. A companion novel to This Is Happiness (2019), it returns readers to the familiar rhythm of this close-knit place and deepens the lives of characters first met there. Originally published in October 2024, the novel was quickly recognized as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, named a Sunday Times Best Historical Fiction Book, and selected as WORLD Magazine’s Fiction Book of the Year. It was also the winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award.

Set in the hushed, holy weeks leading up to Christmas in 1962, the story unfolds through the intertwined lives of Jack Troy, a village doctor; his devoted daughter, Ronnie; and their young neighbor, Jude Quinlan. On the night of the town’s Christmas Fair, Jude makes a discovery that alters everything—an abandoned newborn left outside the local parish. Believing the baby to be dead, he rushes her to the Troys. Against all odds, Jack brings the child back to life.

In the quiet days that follow, Jack and Ronnie secretly care for the baby, bound to her by love and fear in equal measure. In a conservative Catholic community shaped by strict expectations and unspoken rules, Jack worries what will happen if the child’s presence is revealed. As he struggles to protect both the baby and his daughter, he is forced to wrestle with questions of courage, trust, and the true cost of belonging.

Time of the Child is a tender and haunting meditation on the redemptive power of love, the tension between change and tradition, and the fierce strength of family bonds. With his signature lyricism and deep compassion, Williams offers a story that feels at once intimate and timeless—a Christmas tale shaped not by sentiment, but by grace born in difficulty.

Maybe you’d like to join us to discuss that one? Our Little Book Club is open to Take Up Members and to the Founding Circle of this Substack. I’d dearly love to see you there.