A clever concept delivered in a quick beach read; plenty of amusing canine antics for those who love dogs and their slightly...
A young woman decides to open a bakery where humans can sip coffee while their dogs indulge in the specialty of the day.
Millie Whitfield is walking her two rescue shelties, Luke and Annie, when she sees that Cristopher’s Ice Cream and Cookie Shoppe in Houndsville has suddenly closed and the building is up for sale. It is the perfect location for Millie to fulfill her dream of opening a dog bakery. Now she just needs her husband, Carl, to buy the old farmhouse—plus she must assemble a team to work with her. Fortunately, she has hometown friends to call on. Carolyn will help with management, and MaryEllen (the live-in girlfriend of Millie’s older brother, Bradley) will do the baking. Longtime friend Todd fills out the crew. After almost losing the space to the owner of Miss Annabel’s Tea and Coffee Emporium, Millie finally opens the bakery. But Annabel Larson continues to try to sabotage the enterprise, including reporting supposed violations to the health department. When Millie is not spending time running the bakery—including throwing a birthday party for Luke, complete with a dog-safe cake—she is busy playing matchmaker for her customers and friends and organizing an emergency fundraising ball to cover medical costs for 87 shelties rescued from a backyard breeder. Stylistically, Gilman’s (Mollie’s Tail, 2013) prose is casual and too often cutesy—the shops of Houndsville have annoyingly alliterative names (Julie’s Jewels; Frannie’s Flowers; Bridget’s Bookstop), and Millie is always in need of one of Carl’s “squishy hugs.” Character development is minimal, but with the exception of Annabel, the cast—both human and furry—makes for pleasant company. And it’s fun to watch the team devise unique, dog-friendly recipes for biscuits, pupcakes, and muffins. More importantly, the primary message of the breezy narrative—to urge the adoption of rescue dogs—is solidly communicated without sounding too preachy.
A clever concept delivered in a quick beach read; plenty of amusing canine antics for those who love dogs and their slightly quirky humans.Pub Date: May 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4575-6188-7
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic—it blinds you with fairy dust. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. They've seen the evidence for themselves in the besotted behavior of the women who call on the two aunts for charms and potions to help them with their love lives. The aunts grow herbs, make mysterious brews, and have a houseful of—what else?—black cats. The two girls grow up to flee (in opposite directions) from the aunts, the house, and the Massachusetts town where they've long been shunned by their superstitious schoolmates. What they can't escape is magic, which follows them, sometimes in a particularly malevolent form. And, ultimately, no matter how hard they dodge it, they have to recognize that love always catches up with you. As always, Hoffman's writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won't let you get away. But it's just too hard to believe the magic here, maybe because it's not so much practical magic as it is predictable magic, with its crones and bubbling cauldrons and hearts of animals pierced with pins. Sally and Gillian are appealing characters, but, finally, their story seems as murky as one of the aunts' potions—and just as hard to swallow. Too much hocus-pocus, not enough focus. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14055-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
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