Finding Home on Winslow Island (Winslow Island, Book One)

CHRISSY ELLIOT

Stats for my copy: .pdf review copy

Publication date: Kindle edition, 7/31/20

How acquired: Received for review from BookSirens

First line: If romance had a color, glitter would be it.

(For the Goodreads synopsis, scroll to the bottom of this post.)

My thoughts: I requested this book from BookSirens because, like the last book I reviewed for BookSirens, it sounded like a light, fun, romantic comedy, and like that last book, it delivered. From that first glitter filled meet cute to the happy ending. I love small town stories, and the small town in this book was on an island, which was a bonus.

Tessa and her son live with her mother and help run her bed and breakfast. It wasn't Tessa's dream, but she had promised her father that she would take care of her mother after he passed away. She dreams of buying a dilapidated house that she fell in love with, and having her own art studio. But the bed and breakfast is barely breaking even, and she can't abandon her mother.

Parker is a busy doctor with a soaring career at a big city hospital. He rarely comes back to Winslow Island, but his mother is planning a party for his father's birthday. Which just happens to fall during the island's annual Matchmaking Festival.

From their first meeting, Tessa and Parker are at odds with each other. Parker ticks many boxes for me – he's gruff, direct, rude, arrogant. All of which annoys Tessa, almost as much as her attraction to him does. But of course that's just the exterior, hiding the real Parker underneath. His heart was broken in the past, and now it's locked up tight. Neither he or Tessa are looking for a relationship, and Parker has no intention of sticking around anyway.

I really enjoyed this book. Full of amusing supporting characters, and lots of fun banter between Parker and Tessa, as well as between Tessa and her sister, Gabby, and Parker and his brothers. The Matchmaking Festival was an interesting setting, and Tessa roping Parker into participating in a speed dating event was one of the highlights of the book.

Breezy writing, fun dialogue, the story is sweet and heartwarming. The romance is clean, albeit with some steamy kisses. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.

Goodreads synopsis: Join the residents of Winslow Island for a fun-filled, opposites-attract, sweet romance - full of piggyback rides and scrumptious baked goods.

It might be Winslow Island's annual Matchmaking Festival, but Tessa has more important things to worry about, like how to keep her mother's bed and breakfast in business.

Parker's life is as precise and planned as the surgeries he performs. He's on track for a career-making promotion - if he can improve his bedside manner.

When his mother plans a family celebration for the same weekend as the Matchmaking Festival, Parker suspects he's in for a series of sneaky setups. But with his promotion fast approaching, he has no time for distractions - until Tessa crashes into him in a shower of glitter, wreaking havoc with his plans and his heart.

With a temper as fiery as her red hair, she's a distraction too tempting to ignore.

Tessa is determined to resist Parker's charms - even if his smile makes her toes curl. He's only on the island for five days, and she won't risk a broken heart. But with the festival in full swing, resisting Parker is proving harder than she expected, especially when he becomes the key to saving her mother's business.

Can Parker convince Tessa that he's worth taking a chance on, or will his career-focused heart drive them further apart?

Whether you are fans of the Gilmore Girls or the Golden Girls, you'll fall in love with Winslow Island. 

A Basket Brigade Christmas

JUDITH MILLER

NANCY MOSER

STEPHANIE GRACE WHITSON

Synopsis from back of book: With the country embroiled in civil war in 1862, a group of women formed the Basket Brigade and boarded trains to minister to Union soldiers transferring from overflowing hospitals in the South to northerly locations. The Basket Brigade offered fried chicken, pickled peaches, pound cake, and other dainties to men who hadn't eaten a home-cooked meal since enlisting. The women of Decatur, Illinois, served nearly two thousand meals to wounded warriors.

Three bestselling authors were blessed and inspired by the words written by the actual women who organized and participated in relief efforts during the Civil War. They have penned their stories in honor of them.

Stats for my copy: Trade paperback, Barbour Books, 2015.

How acquired: Via BookCrossing.

My thoughts: Three separate stories, from three new-to-me authors. While each story is about a different woman in Decatur, Illinois, there are several characters who appear in all three books, most notably Mrs. Collins, who reminded me of a less offensive Little House on the Prairie Mrs.Oleson. In each story she was a spiteful, self-centered, full of herself woman, who then exhibited some humanity at the end of the story.

The first story, “A Stitch in Time”, by Stephanie Grace Whitson, centers around Lucy, whose deceased father left her a dry goods store and a small fortune thanks to some savvy investments. While volunteering with the Basket Brigade one day, she is appalled that the soldiers traveling on the hospital train don't have enough blankets or socks to keep warm, and she comes up with the idea to open her home as a meeting place for any of the women of Decatur who want to volunteer to sew socks and make quilts and blankets to be distributed on the trains. Jonah is the manager of her store, and has been in love with Lucy forever, but because of a leg injury that keeps him from enlisting, and the differences in their stations in life, he doesn't expect his love to ever be reciprocated. While this was a sweet story, I didn't really connect with Lucy, who was completely oblivious to Jonah and his feelings until the very end.

The second story, “A Pinch of Love”, by Judith Miller, was my favorite. Sarah's mother is one of the organizers and leaders of the Basket Brigade, and when she falls ill, Sarah has to take her place. Sarah has avoided volunteering, as she doesn't think she can deal with seeing the wounded soldiers, but she sucks it up and does her duty. Jacob wants to be fighting at the front, and is disappointed to be assigned to travel with the hospital trains to look out for the wounded soldiers. Until he meets Sarah, of course. I very much liked both Sarah and Jacob, and they slowly get to know one another and develop feelings for each other. Their growing relationship appealed to me more than the non-existent until the end relationship of the previous couple, and the obstacles they had to overcome – another young man who wants Sarah for himself and pretty much stalks her and lies to her, and Jacob's still hurtful memories of his former fiance who turned around and married someone else – were very well written and more realistic for me.

The third story, Endless Melody, by Nancy Moser, seemed to drag on too long, but I think that had less to do with the length of the story and was more because the main characters were living completely separate lives, withe him in another city, and were kept apart for most of the story. Zona and Cardiff were planning to marry fifteen years ago, when Cardiff suddenly left to fight in the war between Texas and Mexico, leaving Zona angry and heartbroken. Cardiff wrote many letters to her, but she never replied, which left him angry and heartbroken. As the story progressed, I kept waiting for them to be reunited, and in the meantime I didn't find either character particularly appealing. I was a little more sympathetic to them as the reasons behind their behavior was revealed, but they never fully resonated with me, and when they did finally meet again, the story was suddenly and abruptly over.

Despite the book's title, this isn't really a Christmas story, or rather Christmas stories, as the season wasn't mentioned that often. The third story does have Zona putting together a Christmas musicale, and some of her group of singers serenading the hospital trains with Christmas carols, but there isn't much else Christmas related. 

Summer Doctor

CHARLES H. KNICKERBOCKER

Synopsis from Goodreads: This is a novel about a very unusual kind of a doctor. Daniel van Dine, M.D., is inclined to wear coveralls, a flannel shirt, and hip-length fisherman’s boots, and he has a sense of humor. He is a nonconformist and a humanist with a keen sense of history. His religious inclinations are rather strong. He is constantly seeking the reason for human suffering and pain. He feels that a deeply personal doctor-patient relationship is more important than the glamor of medical progress.

Dr. Dan decides to locate on a remote island off the cost of Maine. Here, he will be very busy ten weeks out of every year, for Juniper Island is a summer resort. Here, also, he will be lonely, for the conditions in the winter are primitive and the island is inhabited then only by stubborn and cantankerous fishermen.

This is Dr. Dan’s own story of his first three years on Juniper Island. He treats his patients with compassion and individual understanding. He discovers that a doctor can learn more from his patients than he is ever taught in medical school.

Among his patients and neighbors are a much-married millionaire, a fisherman with a curious sense of ethics, a gloomy anthropologist, a violent artist, and a displaced cleric. Among the women who influence him are a city fashion editor, an ex-chorus girl, a spinster librarian, a gin-loving Indian midwife, and an unusual adolescent. One of these manages to marry him. Also, he owns a dog, a mangy hound answering to the unlikely name of Slob.

Dr. Dan tells his story with wit and wisdom. His career is one of growth, and he reaches certain conclusions of interest to doctors and patients alike.

Stats for my copy: Hardback, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963.

How acquired: From my mom.

First line: “Where is this Juniper Island?”

My thoughts: Young doctor is discharged from military service after serving as a medic in the Korean war, and finds he has no desire to begin his civilian life practicing medicine in a big city where doctors and patients maintain a purely professional relationship and don't actually get to know each other. He remembers vacationing on Juniper Island as a child one summer, and decides to relocate, showing up on the island with no plans in place, nowhere to stay, and no way to actually get back and forth between the island and the mainland since the only bridge was washed away. But with the help of an local he quickly finds himself trading his brand new Thunderbird for an old rusty boat and a fixer upper of a house.

Dr. Daniel van Vine, or Doc as he becomes known, didn't really know what he was getting into, but I loved the way he just barged ahead practically on a whim and set up shop, or rather practice, in his new home on the island. The locals are all pretty colorful characters, and Dan's first person narrative about his interactions and exploits with them are amusing, and filled with lots of slightly philosophical ruminations on life. Some of the conversations about women and their role in society were quaint and antiquated, but the book was written over fifty years ago, so it didn't bother me. I am glad, however, that doctors today do not share Dan's belief that:

“...far too much attention is paid, by doctors and patients alike, to the problem of high blood pressure. I could practice just as good medicine, and my patients would live just as long, and more happily, if I threw away my blood pressure machine, but I don't dare.”

When my prescription for my blood pressure medication expired and I wasn't able to get it renewed right away I went off my medication for almost two weeks, and by the end of that second week I felt like I was going to have a heart attack if I did anything that required the least exertion!

Overall I really enjoyed this chatty and engaging book, and I think I'll look around for the author's other books.