By: Suzanne Strempek Shea

To fill the time as she recovered from cancer and chemotherapy, Strempek Shea volunteered at a friend’s independent bookstore in Springfield, Mass. An accomplished novelist (Around Again; Lily of the Valley), Strempek Shea felt at first like a spy—"a farmer hanging around the dairy section"—as she observed customers in constant discovery of books. Despite the bleak reason for her new job, she embraced it with delight and here recounts her sojourn at Edwards Books with humor and passion. Not a great deal happens though, even during the coverage of 9/11. She looks at the small, independent bookstore, and how it stays in business. Although she can’t help making fun of the inane questions she’s sometimes asked ("What would you recommend for a flight to California? I’ll be sleeping most of the time"), she lovingly portrays devoted book folks, such as "the tiny older woman who arrives on her payday to buy two or three more mysteries. The young woman who received the call that the latest of the Gothic novels her mother collects have arrived." The author also shares droll, albeit tacitly self-promoting, insights on the tour for her latest book ("there are maybe forty people at my reading, and I even know two of them!"). As readers absorb the life of the bookstore and author, many will be tempted to look for the titles she drops throughout the work. Book enthusiasts who pine for a friendly, like-minded community will love this light, funny memoir.

By: Suzanne Strempek Shea

Shea's bestselling Hoopi Shoopi Donna and Lily of the Valley established her as a chronicler of Polish-American life with a wholesome and heartwarming, if sometimes treacly, style. Now she focuses on Robyn Panek, who returns to the Massachusetts farm where she spent childhood summers. Her Uncle Pal, too old and sickly to tend to the farm, asks her to run the pony ring for one last summer before he sells the property. Robyn obliges, and finds herself haunted by memories of betrayal. During her last summer on the farm, 18-year-old Robyn, readying for college in the fall, befriended boarder Lucy Dragon, a disturbed teenager sent by her parents to reap the psychological benefits of living in a rural setting. While Lucy and Robyn became fast friends, roaming the farm and its environs with Robyn's boyfriend, Frankie, the summer ended in heartbreak: a neighbor's baby vanished and Robyn realized that neither Lucy nor Frankie were what they seemed. Now, 22 years later, both Lucy and Frankie resurface to make amends. While die-hard fans will appreciate the folksy touches that capture the charm of a smalltown community stuck in a time warp Frankie works at the Day n' Night Dairy; a set of signs outside Pal's farm advertise "Clover Honey, Brown Eggs... Perfectly Round Rocks, Lucky Horseshoes (Used), Your Name in Cement" Shea's narrative meanders between the present and the past, with the central surprise hinted at so heavily that it is robbed of suspense by the time it is revealed. Without the anchor of a compelling plot, this novel feels like its title a retread of themes explored better in the author's previous books.

By: Suzanne Strempek Shea

Shea returns for the third time to the small-town Massachusetts she captured so well in Selling the Lite of Heaven and Hoopi Shoopi Donna for this sentimental yet satisfying tale of dreams realized in peculiar ways. When she was 10, Lily Wilk pulled an art kit out of a grab bag and knew she had found her "true occupation." Twenty-nine years later, Lily is making her living as an artist, though not in the way she once imagined. Kept busy by myriad mundane tasks, she draws children's caricatures at parties, paints signs for rest rooms and fire hydrants and occasionally exhibits her real art work at the post office and local festivals. Still, she remains certain that she is destined for greater things. One day, opportunity knocks in the form of Mary Ziemba, owner of a supermarket chain and the richest woman in town, who commissions Lily to paint a portrait of her family, one that will depict each member "at whatever was the best point in their lives." As the project unfolds, LilyAwhose own immediate family, ex-husband and stepson have recently scattered across the globeAreflects more and more on the true nature of human relations. Shea lovingly renders Lily's family and friendsAamong them, a coupon-addicted uncle and his girlfriend, whose hobby is writing to the survivors of famous dead peopleAwith the same affectionate brushstrokes she employs to describe her protagonist's beloved art. By the time it becomes clear to Lily that family is as much created as it is inherited, readers may well count themselves lucky to have gained vicarious admission to her colorful circle.

By: Suzanne Strempek Shea

After turning to memoir, most recently in Shelf Life [BKL My 1 04], Shea, whose novels include Around Again (2001), returns to fiction in another delightfully enchanting tale about the unorthodox ways dreams can come true. Sophie and Gina leave Massachusetts for the tiny Irish village of Booley on a whim, and, just as whimsically, Gina returns home after just one day. Sophie stays, captivated by Booley's charm and denizens, especially a woman who is no longer around. Finola O'Flynn, she of the shop that bears her name, skipped town without so much as a wave of her shillelagh, breaking her lover's heart and leaving scores of devoted villagers whose problems she solved in the lurch. As Sophie literally steps into Finola's shoes, she begins living Finola's life. So effortless is the transformation, Sophie is unwilling to relinquish her new identity--and new boyfriend--when the real Finola suddenly reappears. Shea's Sophie is a beguiling heroine, a plucky, lucky American minx who becomes the sort of Irish lass that would have made Maureen O'Hara proud.

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