The summer is as good a time as any to add new friends to your life, and reading The Saving Graces is certain to add at least four: Emma, Rudy, Lee, and Isabel. By the time you’ve finished the novel, you will feel as though you not only know these four women, but you’ll miss them the way you miss good friends.

Each of these four friends takes turns telling the story of the Graces a group of women who years ago began meeting periodically to discuss a women’s topic. Chapter by chapter, each woman reveals details about herself through the choices she makes in what to reveal about the others, until you’re gradually aware that you have become one of this group and are being told things the others don’t know.

Rudy and Lee slowly reveal the unhappiness of their marriages one of them finally deciding to end the destructive relationship and the other discovering the real reason for her unhappiness. Emma, who thinks of men as speed bumps, is very open with the reader about her coveting a married man. While the other three eventually learn about her unfulfilled longings, she lets only the reader and one other friend know who he is and what a road block he has become. Isabel, the oldest of the Graces, seems to emanate grace and wisdom as she faces the hardest decisions. In the end, it is her wisdom and foresight that allow the Graces to continue after what could have caused the group to disband.

Men, hairstyles, an abandoned dog, and food not exactly women’s topics, but as Emma puts it, We’ve already talked about everything under the sun. There’s nothing left. As in a typical group of friends, someone disagrees. Lee thinks they’ve all become lazier and just find it easier to gossip than to organize a discussion topic. Thank goodness for disorganization! It is what allows us to learn the story of four unusual women who form a group we would all like to join. It is what allows us to think of each of them as a new friend and to miss each one the minute the last page of The Saving Graces is read.

Jamie Whitfield writes from her home in Hendersonville, Tennessee.

If you’re feeling stressed, but can’t afford that getaway weekend in the Caribbean don’t despair. Grab your lawnchair, find a patch of filtered sun, inhale deeply and enter Karen Stolz’s World of Pies. Although set in the turbulent ’60s, this novel about growing up in a small Texas town will fill you with a sweet nostalgia that goes down as easily as Mabel’s Angel Food Cake with Chocolate Sauce. (Recipe included!) Comfort food recipes are, in fact, sprinkled throughout World of Pies, but Stolz’s real accomplishment in this taste-tempting first novel is the delicious batch of episodes she has baked up for us about the life of Roxanne Milner, a baseball-loving tomboy whose first-person narrative rings with the honest emotions the exhilaration and devastation, the confusion and wonder of growing up.

In the hot summer of ’61, 12-year-old Roxanne would rather be out pitching balls to her cousin Tommy than in the kitchen rolling pie dough, but the ensuing pie fair has the townswomen in a baking frenzy as they strive to perfect their individual recipes for the contest. But “at the eleventh hour,” to her mother’s delight and her own surprise, Roxanne develops an interest in the art that affords the mother a chance to teach and the daughter to learn. “And it happened,” she says, amazed at her ability to be gentle and precise. “I got the feel of the dough and learned how to make a decent piecrust.” The lessons she learns are not confined to the kitchen as race becomes a factor in the pie contest, the Vietnam War looms, and she gets her first, less-than-riveting kiss. While trying to figure out boys, and believing she will never look “right,” Roxanne experiences the consequences of taking a stand against racism in her small hometown, she gains insight into the complexities of her parents’ marriage and eventually explores her own burgeoning awareness of the increasingly attractive opposite sex.

Stolz packs a lot into 153 pages. Written with a flair for understatement and the telling detail, this humorous, relationship-rich tale is wholly satisfying. It may be a slim volume, but I found it a deep dish, full of insight into the human heart.

You’ll want to savor Roxanne’s adventures along with her recipes, so you may want to bake ahead. Then you won’t have to stop turning pages to check the oven! Lemonade, anyone? Linda Stankard is a writer in Cookeville, Tennessee, who believes in the restorative powers of baked goods.

Twenty-one-year-old Leandra was estranged from her sister and had never flown on an airplane or been outside her native North Carolina more than once. That, however, didn’t keep her from flying to Massachusetts immediately after her sister, Pamela, asked for her help during a difficult pregnancy. Little did Leandra’s much older brother-in-law, William, know when he first saw her at the airport that he would enter into a brief but passionate love affair with her not too long afterward. Little did both of them know that tragedy would soon follow this affair, and again a decade later.

But sometimes the foreknowledge of tragedy can illuminate startling beauty. In Susan Dodd’s mature, poignant, and warm-hearted third novel, The Mourner’s Bench, she shows the simple and strong ways that two seemingly incompatible people can find the consolation and love they need within each other.

At the novel’s beginning, Leandra is living alone in her house on the coast of North Carolina, mending dolls by vocation and still mulling over the deaths of her sister and her sister’s baby. William, or Wim, is dying of cancer and is traveling down South to see Leandra for the first time in ten years. Though he has remarried, he has decided that he is going to spend the rest of his short time left with Leandra that is, if she will let him.

Dodd, who has taught at Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, demonstrates her mastery of the English language by telling the powerful story in two distinct voices: the literary and decidedly high-brow tone of Wim, and the wise and just plain wise-cracking Southern style of Leandra. The two different voices allow Dodd to show the vulnerabilities of her two characters and the grace with which they accept the emotional baggage they will carry for the rest of their lives.

Through the comfort she conjures through telling details the preparation of a simple meal, the glow from stars overhead, the feel of a rose-colored comforter when one is bone-tired Dodd also shows that, ultimately, the connections that most reward are the ones that need no extra adornment. Loss and tragedy are unavoidable in life (and certainly in the ending of Dodd’s novel), but through it all, Leandra and Wim show that the chance to love and be loved is reassuringly near.

Deb Saine is a reviewer in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

In her new novel Half a Heart, Rosellen Brown uses the experiences of one woman to examine the dual themes of motherhood and race. Brown, noted author of Before and After and Civil Wars allows the reader a deep look at the interior terrain of Miriam Vener, a beleaguered woman confronting the responsibilities of parenting and the challenges of racial prejudice.

A former civil rights activist, Miriam has seen her life change in many ways some subtle, some obvious. When she was a young woman involved in the intense Mississippi civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, Miriam possessed a liberal, humanist outlook that opened her to a forbidden affair with a black professor at a local college. That controversial liaison produced a daughter who is relinquished to her father after a heated child custody dispute.

Now 18 years later, Miriam is married to a wealthy ophthalmologist in the upper-middle-class suburbs of Houston, with children and an aging mother preoccupied with death. The staid, comfortable life of affluence has sparked feelings of ambivalence and tension, fostering her desire to reconnect with the daughter she gave up years before. The novel soars as Miriam seeks out her African-American daughter, Veronica, who is a troubling mix of sensitivity, intelligence, conflicting emotions, and racial pride. Brown pulls no punches in her insights into the character of these two women separated by both race and class. Veronica wants to make her mother pay dearly for her long absence from her life, and some of the book’s most potent scenes occur when the pair clash in their emotional tug of war.

Through her reunion with her daughter, Miriam gets to reassess her roles as mother, wife, and former activist, as well as examine the themes of identity, intimacy, and femininity. While Brown’s astute observations about the value of wealth and influence are noteworthy, her views on love and race are especially fascinating. Describing the courtship between Eljay and Miriam during the perilous times of the civil rights movement, she writes: She was amazed at what she saw: that, no part of them forbidden, they were beautiful together, they were remaking the whole ugly world, and yes, he was right, she had not failed to notice their differences. It would be easy to be overwhelmed by the novel’s complex themes and its many heart-wrenching scenes and miss the book’s low-key humanity and gentle honesty.

The resolution of the novel’s overlapping conflicts is handled with delicacy, care, and precision. This is the power and grace of Brown’s most introspective, accomplished work to date.

Paul Evans, the best-selling author of the phenomenally successful The Christmas Box trilogy, has created yet another masterpiece. The Looking Glass, Evans’s seventh book, is poised to join the runaway success of his past work.

Set in the town of Bethel, Utah, during the pioneering days of the late 1800s, The Looking Glass is the fascinating love story of Hunter Bell and Quaye MacGandley and the struggles they undergo on the way to finding that love.

Bell, a former Presbyterian minister-turned-gambler, has spent most of his adult life running; he ran from his ministry to escape the never-ceasing memory of his wife’s tragic death and the young daughter he had to leave behind in Pennsylvania. Once a refugee from frontier justice, Bell is seemingly content to live out a solitary life in the rugged mountains above Bethel. Until, that is, during a blinding blizzard, he rescues a beautiful Irish maiden who turns his empty world upside-down.

As a young woman, Quaye MacGandley was sold into marital slavery during the Irish potato famine and brought to America against her will, finally ending up in Bethel. Abused and thrown out into a raging Utah snowstorm by her brutal husband, Quaye struggles to escape this tragic life.

Surrounded by a hungry pack of wolves, she is mercifully rescued by Hunter Bell, who nurses her back to health. His tender ministrations help to heal her wounds, but can they heal her broken heart? And, in turn, can Hunter open his heart to his own greatest fear: that he might love again? This beautiful tale of Hunter and Quaye is an inspiring, heartwarming story of how two wounded people help restore each other through the unending power of love and understanding. Written in short, simple chapters, Richard Evans skillfully creates yet another memorable cast of endearing characters who will touch lives worldwide.

A consummate storyteller, Evans’s work reflects a message of hope, love, and faith. Truly magical in content, The Looking Glass will delight and entertain new readers, and inspire and encourage Evans’s established legions of loyal fans. ¦ Sharon Galligar Chance is a book reviewer from Wichita Falls, Texas.

The Wholeness of a Broken Heart is the kind of book that makes you want to curl up and be left in solitude so that you can become fully immersed in the lives of its inhabitants. The story is told in the words of four generations of Jewish women, from the great-grandmother Channa, born in Koretz, Poland, in 1880, to the great-granddaughter Hannah, for whom she is named, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in l989. Although the story focuses on particular generations of Jewish mothers and daughters, it transcends these cultural boundaries to include women’s relationships in all cultures.

The story centers around Hannah and her relationship with her mother, which was intensely intimate until a casual comment catapulted them into irreparable separation. Hannah struggles with this loss, relying on the comfort and insight of her grandmother to help her survive. As we go back and forth through time, we discover the secrets and events that make this family of women both weak and strong, passive and domineering, depressed and joyful.

The stories involve you in the ties that bind these women together and the struggles that drive them apart. Katie Singer’s style is engaging, and the tales are colorfully laced with the Yiddish language, which makes for a poignant expression of the lessons and emotions that are passed down through the generations. These Yiddish expressions create a special intimacy not typically found in modern life, where we so often lack the right words to convey our feelings. The title itself comes from an old Yiddish proverb, Es is nitto a gantsere zach vi ah tsiprochene harts, There’s nothing more whole than a broken heart. This book, however, makes one’s heart full with the knowledge that love and family, while often the cause of much heartache, are ultimately the very things that make us whole again. Lorraine Rose is a writer and psychotherapist in Washington, D.

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