This month in BookTrib, we are celebrating Women’s Fiction titles that showcase unplanned vacations. Getting stuck on the road, at the airport, on a boat, at a house for the weekend. Stories where the character is unable to leave a location and has to deal with the situation. It may be the weather, money, things breaking or going awry, a family matter or something more sinister, but we want to see that character trapped and work their way out, or do they?
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Road to Somewhere by Julie Mayerson Brown
WTG Press, July 2019
When the going gets tough, Patty Sullivan runs.
The day her kitchen ceiling collapses on top of her, Patty’s life unravels. Whether a sign from above or plain bad luck, she has no idea. But her brush with death shakes her to her core. With no boyfriend, no plans, and nowhere to stay, she leaves her condemned Venice Beach home and heads to California wine country to be near Cece, her best friend, confidante and quintessential voice of reason.
A few days in the quiet small town of Clearwater should give her the comfort she needs to contemplate one of life’s most enduring questions: “What now?” But one day into her stay, Patty’s troubles multiply — Cece suffers a crisis of her own; a gourmet shop owner ropes her into a demanding situation; and an enticing yet complicated man has her spinning toward romantic disaster.
However, it’s the mysterious arrival of her younger sister that pushes Patty to the brink and forces her to question everything she thought she knew about her childhood and the family in which she felt she never belonged. Now, faced with a monumental decision, Patty has no choice but to gamble on the one person she trusts the least — herself.
Boop and Eve’s Road Trip by Mary Helen Sheriff
She Writes Press, October 2020
Eve Prince is done — with college, with her mom, with guys and with her dream of fashion design. But when her best friend goes MIA, Eve must gather together the broken threads of her life in order to search for her.
When Eve’s grandmother, Boop, a retiree dripping with Southern charm, finds out about the trip, she — desperate to see her sister, and also hoping to alleviate Eve’s growing depression — hijacks her granddaughter’s road trip. Boop knows from experience that healing Eve will require more than flirting lessons and a Garlic Festival makeover. Nevertheless, Boop is frustrated when her feeble efforts yield the same failure that her sulfur-laced sip from the Fountain of Youth wrought on her age. Car trouble forces Boop and Eve to stay overnight in Boop’s hometown — the same hometown Boop fled in anger and shame decades before. She knows that sharing the secret that’s haunted her for sixty years might be the one thing that will lessen Eve’s growing depression — but she also fears that if she reveals it, she’ll lose her family and her own hard-won happiness.
A Song for the Road by Kathleen Basi
Alcove Press, May 2021
An unconventional road trip and what it means to honor the ones we love.
It’s one year after the death of her husband and twin teenagers, and Miriam Tedesco has lost faith in humanity and herself. When a bouquet of flowers that her husband always sends on their anniversary shows up at her workplace, she completely unravels. With the help of her best friend, she realizes that it’s time to pick up the pieces and begin to move on. Step one is not even cleaning out her family’s possessions, but just taking inventory starting with her daughter’s room. But when she opens her daughter’s computer, she stumbles across a program her daughter has created detailing an automated cross-country road trip, for her and her husband to take as soon-to-be empty nesters.
Having listened to the video clips of her kids embedded in the program, Miriam is determined to take this trip for her children. Armed with her husband’s guitar, her daughter’s cello and her son’s unfinished piano sonata, she embarks on a musical pilgrimage to grieve the family she fears she never loved enough. Along the way, she meets a young, pregnant hitchhiker named Dicey, whose boisterous and spunky attitude reminds Miriam of her own daughter.
Tornadoes, impromptu concerts and an unlikely friendship … whether she’s prepared for it or not, Miriam’s world is coming back to life. But as she struggles to keep her focus on the reason she set out on this journey, she has to confront the possibility that the best way to honor her family may be to accept the truths she never wanted to face. A Song for the Road is about courage, vulnerability and forgiveness, even of yourself, when it really matters.
Over the Falls by Rebecca Hodge
Crooked Lane Books, September 2021
How far will one woman go to find her sister? Bryn Collins moved to the Eastern Tennessee mountains and never looked back when, fourteen years ago, her fiancé, Sawyer, jilted her for her despised sister, Del. Sawyer was later killed in a plane crash, but Bryn has never been able to forgive her sister for what she did, and instead chooses to spend her days in the idyllic beauty of the rugged landscape. Although a life-threatening accident ended her days navigating the perils of whitewater, she still finds refuge kayaking in the local lakes.
But Bryn’s placid life hits the skids when an unwelcome cast of characters re-enters her life. Del goes mysteriously missing, leading her fourteen-year-old son, Josh, to Bryn’s doorstep for help. Then Carl, a trouble-making outcast the sisters knew years before, is desperate to find Del because she owes him money, pulling Bryn into the orbit of his schemes.
On the hunt for Del, Bryn and Josh follow an ever-elusive trail to Colorado, and at the annual Mountain Games competition in Vail, they finally confront the truth. For Bryn, all roads lead to the river, and on vicious Colorado whitewater, she is forced to muster every ounce of courage and strength she has to piece her family back together again.
Dark Blue Waves by Kimberly Sullivan
Indie published, May 2022
When you wake up in Bath, England two hundred years in the past, how far can a love of Jane Austen get you?
Janet Roberts dreams of an academic career in literature, so she can hardly believe her good fortune when she’s accepted into a Jane Austen graduate seminar in Bath, England. Settled in Georgian splendor among her seminar colleagues, Janet and her classmates live, eat and breathe Jane Austen.
An accident interrupts this idyll when Janet regains consciousness in her own room — back in Regency England. For a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, this should be a dream come true. But Janet quickly learns there’s a world of difference between scholarly knowledge of the written page and maneuvering real life as a reluctant time traveller.
Her burgeoning friendship with Emma Huntington eases her entrée into nineteenth-century society. However, Emma’s brother, the handsome, proud and frustratingly magnetic Sir Edward, is far less welcoming. Janet treads a thin line between trying to blend into her new world and not being unmasked as the imposter she is. Can she find the way to return to her twenty-first century life before her secret is discovered? After working so hard to create a rewarding nineteenth-century life for herself, does she want to?
