Off the Bookshelf: HOW SWEET IT IS

Book exchanges are great. Besides creating room on your shelf for new treasures and new authors to discover, you get to share a book that you know you won't read again (not because you don't want to, but because there just isn't enough TIME to go back) with someone who might just fall in love and make it a keeper. Everybody has different tastes.

Thank goodness. That means out there are people who love my books, along with people who like them and others -- may they be few! -- who see my name on a book cover and say, "Meh!"

HOW SWEET IT IS, by Alice Wisler, came to me through a book exchange with my ACFW chapter a year or so ago. Maybe longer. Just shows how BIG my to-be-read pile/bookshelf is. Wish I had read this charming, first person POV journey of recovery from shattered dreams and love and a car wreck and its attendant scars just a little sooner.

Deena, our heroine, is a chef -- until the story starts, working at an upscale restaurant in Atlanta. Then a car wreck and discovering her fiance had someone else in his life and an inheritance from her grandfather send her to the mountains of North Carolina. Maybe she doesn't start out searching for change, but it finds her. She learns from some unique and charming characters along the way and learns something about herself while she struggles to teach cooking to emotionally wounded children and set up her cake business. I wish I had her remote cabin in the mountains... Read the book, and visit there for a while, too. You won't say, "Meh!" to this story. Delicious, soft, and sweet. Like the white velvet cake recipe included.