Kathleen Colvin, Author

Cozy Mysteries

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Reading Notes: The Secret, Book & Scone Society by Ellery Adams

Who wouldn’t want to hang out in a bookstore where the owner senses what books you need to fill your soul or solve your problems? Or visit a bakery where the baker can make the scone that you need exactly right now?

In The Secret, Book & Scone Society, Adams takes this intriguing idea and runs with it when a stranger comes to the little town of Miracles Springs. He’s got a hole in his heart—and a change of mind for possible nefarious deeds that his business partners are proposing—and meets the protagonist Nora Pennington on a park bench. She directs him to the bakery and then to come to her store, Miracle Books, where she’ll find the books that will be perfect for him.

The Secret, Book & Scone Society (A Secret, Book, and Scone Society Novel 1) by Ellery Adams

Nora’s got her own wounds. She’s had burns on her arms and face from an auto accident, and she’s used to strangers staring at her. It was enough for her to leave her old life behind, but in her new life, she’s wary of any relationship that might turn into a friendship.

The stranger never comes to the bookstore, and Nora learns that he was killed by a train. The sheriff calls it suicide, but Nora suspects differently. To get investigate, she has to become friends with three other women, the town’s baker, hairdresser and bath attendant at the town’s Miracle Springs hotel. Nora is forced to open up to these women in order to understand the clues. It’s difficult for her, and when she withholds information about her own life being threatened, the other women call her out on it.

The trail leads the four women to a development company developing a subdivision outside of town, where everything isn’t as prosperous as it seems. Along the way, she meets the attractive paramedic who sees beyond her scars and appreciates who she is.

Small town politics meets big city business in this charming novel of different women who vow to form a secret society to solve a mystery. At the end, it’s only through Nora’s connections with other people that help solve the mystery and open herself up to new experiences.

I enjoyed the references to books that Nora suggested to her clients, and want to see more of her recommendations to other troubled souls. 

Want to chat about The Secret, Book & Scone Society? Let’s connect on Facebook!

Like the Book or Mysteries in General? Want to Enter my Drawing for Free Books? Join My Book Club!

This book will be included in my upcoming book club drawing. If you’re on my email list, you are automatically entered into the book club drawings. If you’re not, click here to sign up, and if you know anyone else who’d love to join the book club, please share the link with them too (thank you!).

Till next time,

Kathleen

    

Winter 2020 Book Club Drawing Coming Up – About the Books

The drawing of the next book-club winner is coming up on February 28th. After the drawing, I will reach out to the winner to mail them three wonderful books – The Only Woman in the Room, Victoria, and Learning to See.

Winter 2020 Book Club Books: The Only Woman in the Room, Victoria, and Learning to See

Learning to See by Elise Hooper

In Learning to See, Elise Hooper tells the gripping tale of photographer Dorothea Lange, a woman torn between work and family during the brutal Great Depression. I love this book and I wrote about it more here.

The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict

The Only Woman in the Room follows the unbelievable life story of Hedy Lamarr. As a movie star, she had glamorous roles wearing high fashion, yet, off the set, Lamarr used her vast intelligence to work on inventions such as an improved traffic light, a soft drink, and the invention she patented, a frequency-hopping radio signal so that World War II enemies could not track torpedo signals.

Benedict takes this fantastic story and makes it believable.

The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict

The novel opens with young Hedy on stage in Austria before World War II, attracting the attention of an arms manufacturer she would later marry and, when he became too possessive, flee from to the United States.  After the Navy Department refuses to consider Lamarr’s radio signal invention, Benedict ends with Hedy back on stage, using her beauty and glamor to raise money for the war effort, resigned to her fate.

But I wonder, after a lifetime of fighting, would not Lamarr have risen again, perhaps not in the same brilliant scale, but still come to some psychological triumph?

Victoria by Daisy Goodwin

In Victoria, Daisy Goodwin traces the path of Queen Victoria from the start of her reign to the decision to marry Albert.

I assumed that once you became queen, you had it made, but this novel explores Victoria’s tricky path to learn protocol and understand how to get and keep both public and bureaucratic support. (Todays’ uproar over Prince Andrew and Megan Markle shows it’s not an easy a path.)

Victoria by Daisy Goodwin

Victoria realizes that she needs someone with governmental knowledge on which to rely and to remain a trusted advisor. Having at least one trusted advisor is a good lesson for all of us. Goodwin divides the book into four clear-cut divisions, perhaps because it made it easily fit with the Masterpiece Theater episodes (I haven’t watched the tv version, because I wanted to read the novel first). The book ends with her proposal to Albert, but like Victoria’s growth into becoming a confident queen, I wonder if the marital relationship might have taken some getting used to as well.

Like the Books? Want to Enter the Drawing? Join My Book Club!

If you’re on my email list, you are automatically entered into the book club drawings. If you’re not, click here to sign up, and if you know anyone else who’d love to join the book club, please share the link with them too (thank you!).

Till next time,

Kathleen

Reading Notes: Learning to See by Elise Hooper

Learning to See by Elise Hooper is one of my book club books for Winter 2020. To learn more and join my book club, click here.

I read Learning to See’s 330 pages in one session, unwilling to get up off the couch and do something else. This story is the gripping tale of a woman torn between work and family.

In the book, Elise Hooper tells the story of photographer Dorothea Lange, well-known for her iconic 1936 photograph “Migrant Mother,” and her struggle between being an artist and breadwinner and being a mother, without societal safety nets like food stamps and while facing the horror of poverty.

“Migrant Mother” – Dorothea Lange’s iconic 1936 photograph of a beaten-down Depression-era mother.

During the brutal Great Depression, Lange was the chief wage earner for her family. She had no family who could watch her children as she traveled for weeks, photographing migrant camps of those who themselves struggled to feed their families and find work. Lange was forced to put her children into an informal foster care, which affected their relationship into adulthood.

Hooper depicts Lange’s “everyday courage,” showing the character as struggling with the aftereffects of polio as well as gastric problems while trying to earn a living and keep her family together. This book has relevant themes for many of us today as many of us, like me, try to balance work with a family life.

Harper’s descriptions of color and detail are particularly well-crafted, illustrating the world as Dorothea Lange would have seen it.

Learning to See: A Novel of Dorothea Lange, the Woman Who Revealed the Real America by Elise Hooper

Elise Hooper has written a great book. If you haven’t read it and want to try your luck at getting a free copy of the book (along with two other books), join my book club by February 28th, 2020!

Would you like to chat about Learning to See? Share your thoughts here on Facebook.

Winter 2020 – Book Club Books Announced

Happy 2020! I loved sending the books to the fall 2019 book club winner! Maybe next time it’ll be you.

Here are the books for the winter drawing:

Victoria by Daisy Goodwin
Learning to See by Elise Hooper
The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict

If you’re on my email list, you are automatically entered into the book club drawings. If you’re not, click here to sign up, and if you know anyone else who’d love to join the book club, please share the link with them too (thank you!).

Till next time,

Kathleen

First Book Club Winner Picked!

I have just picked my first book club winner! The winner has received an email letting them know that they won.

The next drawing is coming up in February with three new books I personally love. If you’re subscribed to my mailing list, you’re all set – anyone subscribed to my email list will be entered to win. If you’re not on my list, consider subscribing, find the details here.

As a reminder, the books for the October drawing were:

  • The Other Alcott by Elise Hooper
  • The Address by Fiona Davis
  • Old Baggage by Lissa Evans

I will announce the next books by Thanksgiving.

Till next time,

Kathleen

Ancient Roman Metella (died about 80 BC) Made Her Own Fortune

Painting of Roman Woman by Godman (1903)The real estate agent grinned. “That’s what I planned,” she said, a knowing look on her face. She spoke in response to my comment that the acreage the agent lives on could someday be subdivided and sold into several lots.

Women in real estate? It’s not all the common. I’m reading a journal article about how Victorian houses built in the 1870s in San Francisco and it’s all about the men building and developing.

You’d think that real estate was always the male arena, at least until recently. Yes, there might of have been few women involved in property, but it’s incorrect to say there were no women, particularly in ancient times.

In the article Urban Real Estate in Late Republican Rome, the author notes that a woman called Metella purchased large blocks of property in Rome and then subdivided them, presumably for a profit.

She needed dough. Metella was the fourth wife of Lucius Sulla, a statesman and general, who fought for control of Rome. At one point, when enemies burned Sulla’s villas, Metella had to flee for safety with her children to her husband in Greece. She kindly offered to help his supporters financially.

Yet when her husband celebrated a victory with a lavish feast to the god Hercules, Metella was sick and near death. Priests told Sulla not to go near her and not to have his house polluted by her. So he divorced her and had her dumped at another house.

In hard times, a woman needs good investments.