Reading the Sweet Oak by Jan Stites

Reading the Sweet Oak
by Jan Stites

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Just released: September 29, 2015
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Genre: Women's Fiction
Paperback: 386 pages
Rating: 4.5

First sentence(s):
Tulsa slipped her canoe paddle into the Sweet Oak, a lazy song of a river that threaded the Ozark hills for miles.

After losing first her husband, then her daughter, seventy-eight-year-old grandmother Ruby wants to teach her risk-averse granddaughter, Tulsa, that some leaps are worth taking, no matter how high the potential fall. Tulsa loves her grandmother dearly, but she has a business to run and no time for romance—not even the paperback version. But when Ruby ropes her into a book club, Tulsa can’t bring herself to disappoint the woman who raised her.

Together with Ruby’s best friend, Pearl, as well as family friends BJ and Jen, the women embark on an exploration of modern-day love guided by written tales of romance. What they discover is a beautiful story that examines the bonds of friendship and the highs and lows of love in all its forms.

PeekAbook:



My two-bits:

Multiple character story lines appear in this chick-lit tale. However, all inter-related and mesh well.

The added treat is a romance book club. Loved how the book club selections and discussions from the meetings blended into the lives of each woman.

It was also interesting to get perspectives from women of different ages and states of relationships.

Got me thinking of the meaning of romance and love.

About the author:

Jan Stites has been a screenwriter, a screenwriting instructor, a waitress, a secretary, a middle school teacher in both inner-city and affluent schools, a scuba dive travel writer, a journalist, a transcriptionist for doctors and for documentary filmmakers, and a volunteer teacher in Kenya and the Yucatan. She considers the affirmative action plan she wrote for a maritime company to be perhaps her greatest work of fiction. Edgewise, set in a gritty Oakland setting, is Jan's debut novel. She's currently hard at play writing her next different book--a romantic comedy set in the Ozarks. Scheduled for release in the spring of 2014, Reading the Sweet Oak is a different, much lighter book involving small towns, good friends, rivers, herons and love in many forms.

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* review copy courtesy of book tour sponsored by BookSparks. @booksparks

* SIGNUP to win this review copy (here).