by Nicholas Sparks

Jeremy Marsh is a skeptic whose had some success with the media, and when he goes to a small town in North Carolina to debunk some graveyard ghost-lights, it’s pretty clear he intends to solve the mystery and beat a hasty retreat to his home in New York. Instead he finds himself falling in love with town librarian Lexie Darnell.

As with many of Sparks’s novels, True Believer is a gentle tale with earthy three-dimensional characters that seem like people any of us might know. Character is as vital as plot with him, and that’s good, because to be honest, I found the plot of this offering to be a bit predictable. I won’t outline it here, because I don’t like to offer spoilers, I’ll just say that it’s best to read this novel because you want to visit a cozy small town and meet interesting people, and not because you’re looking for a great surprise ending or plot twist.

As a cozy novel, True Believer goes well with a rainy day and hot tea, and in that light, it’s an enjoyable read.

by Alexandra Styron

I found this novel, the story of Adelaide “Addy” Abraham, to be an extremely difficult read, and as I’ve analyzed it, I’ve realized it was because I found the main character annoying. Addy is the daughter of an actress and an artist who are both too self-absorbed to have any clue of how to be parents, so they hire Lou, recently arrived from the Caribbean island of St. Clair, to be her nanny. As the novel opens, however, we are introduced to an adult Addy, a broken, sour person, who has come for Lou’s funeral.

The novel flips between Addy’s present – the funeral and her interactions with Lou’s family, who are polite, but don’t hail her as the visiting dignitary she imagined herself to be – and two different parts of Addy’s past, her adulthood including a sort of influenza-induced breakdown, and her childhood, which often found her pitting Lou and her parents against each other.

By the time a fragile, broken Addy makes peace with her even more broken parents, the novel has ended, and while the language used within it was vivid, the places realistic, and the characters plausible, I found the whole book to be…somehow missing something.

Or maybe I was missing something.

Francesca’s Kitchen by Peter Pezzelli

Francesca Campanile is a classic Italian-American widow. Her youngest child has reached adulthood and doesn’t live at home any more, and her older children have moved to opposite ends of the country and have families of their own. Needing to feel needed, she answers an ad for a single mother looking for a nanny. What she finds is a new family.

The mother, Loretta, works too many hours, and the kids, Penny and Will (one wonders if the other was a fan of <i>Lost in Space</i>, have no structure. Francesca changes that, becoming a mother figure to Loretta and a grandmother-figure to the kids. When Loretta hits it off with Francesca’s unmarried son, the family unit is cemented into one.

What could be a cheesy tale is made real by the validity of the various character’s emotions: Francesca feels old and useless, Loretta feels like a failure as a mother, etc.  That Italian food and home cooking are prevalent themes only makes the book stronger, for the kitchen is the heart of any home. And that’s what this book has plenty of: heart.

Warning: may make you crave baked ziti.