SWEET LAKE

In a dying small town, an innkeeper fights with her irresponsible brother for control of the family business—while a local lawyer fights for her heart.

Linnie Wayfair runs the Wayfair Inn with her two friends Jada and Cat, who, after falling on hard times, have consolidated their businesses (a bakery for Jada and special-events company for Cat) under one roof. But her brother, Freddie, owns fifty percent of the business and takes zero responsibility for running it, having run off with most of the family's money seven years earlier. Now he's back, and in a Solomon-like dilemma, the siblings will either have to split the hotel in two and watch it die or let one person have it in order to save it. Luckily, the beloved inn in Sweet Lake, Ohio, is the favorite meeting place of the Sweet Lake Sirens, an eccentric group of women who refuse to see it shut down. Local attorney Daniel Kettering, who has been trying for years to get Linnie’s attention, is stuck mediating between the two siblings. But Daniel handles his prospective in-laws with chivalry, as if to show Linnie exactly how he’d fit into her life if given the chance. The novel’s strength is that because Linnie’s enemy is her brother, the end goal is a compromise rather than a win. The theme that “any event capable of breaking a woman could break her open instead, to reveal her true beauty and power” reveals itself in surprising ways.

In this uplifting and charming story, each room of the inn is filled with friendship, forgiveness, and love.