This month in BookTrib, we celebrate women’s fiction titles that showcase stories driven by the main character’s talents and unique skills: someone able to ride rodeos and manage a big ranch, another who can photograph the surreal lights and sceneries of Iceland while learning the art of glass-blowing, an animal whisperer, an end-of-life doula, a baker with no rivals, a soap opera star, a revolutionary, pianist during the Great Depression and a poet/revolutionary. Here are eight stories that will both inspire and transport you.
The Fifth Daughter of Thorn Ranch by Julia Brewer Daily
Emma Rosales is heiress to the largest ranch in Texas. She is uncertain, however, whether she can handle the responsibilities of its million acres as the fifth generation to own the land. After she stumbles upon an undiscovered secret on the ranch, Emma realizes that her life may be at risk. Will she survive her attempts to return home, or will she accept finally fate and remain hidden away from her family forever?
Emma however is a fierce competitor. A skilled equestrian, she wins most of her races, competes in clay shoots, besting her fellow contenders, and enjoys wrangling cattle on the side. She’s also a scholar who’s earned a college degree with the highest honors. This story of a remarkable young woman facing seemingly insurmountable odds with passion and dedication will steal your heart. The Fifth Daughter of Thorn Ranch is a family saga as large as the state of Texas.
The Color of Ice by Barbara Linn Probst
This compelling story of love and redemption is set among the glaciers and thermal lagoons of Iceland, and brought to life by the magical art of glassblowing. Cathryn McAllister, a freelance photographer, travels to Iceland for a photo shoot with an enigmatic artist who wants to capture the country’s iconic blue icebergs in glass. When the job is done, her plan is to go on a carefully curated best-of-Iceland solo vacation.
Widowed young, Cathryn raised two children while achieving professional success. If the price of that efficiency has been the dimming of her internal flame — well, she hasn’t let herself think about this. Until now. Bit by bit, Cathryn abandons her itinerary to remain with Mack, the glassblower, who awakens a hunger for all the things she’s told herself she doesn’t need anymore. Passion. Vulnerability. Risk. And the rediscovery of her own art. Cathryn finds herself torn between the life she knows and the new world that Mack is opening for her. Just when her path seems clear, she’s faced with a shocking discovery — and a devastating choice that shows her what love really means.
The Invincible Miss Cust by Penny Haw
Aleen Cust has big dreams and an unusual skill. She has immense and remarkable talent in her skill with animals. And no one — not her family, society, or the law — will stop her from becoming Britain and Ireland’s first female veterinary surgeon. Born in Ireland in 1868 to an aristocratic English family, Aleen pursues her passion and attends the New Veterinary College in Edinburgh, enrolling as A. I. Custance to spare her family the humiliation they fear.
The Invincible Miss Cust is based on the real life of Aleen Isabel Cust who defied her family and society to break through societal norms to live the life she imagined for herself. This is a story of battling patriarchy and an unequal society to realize one’s dreams, paving the way for other women who also faced seemingly insurmountable odds.
The Next Thing You Know by Jessica Strawser
Me Before You meets A Star Is Born in this powerful new novel from the author of A Million Reasons Why (A People Magazine “Best New Novels” pick).
Nova Huston’s job as doula is to help terminally ill people make peace with their impending death. Unlike her business partner, who swears by her system of checklists, free-spirited Nova doesn’t shy away from difficult clients: the heartbreakingly young, the prickly, or those aching for companionship. When Mason Shaylor shows up at her door, Nova doesn’t recognize him as the famous singer-songwriter who recently vanished from the public eye. She knows only what he’s told her: that life as he knows it is over. His deteriorating condition makes playing his guitar physically impossible―as far as Mason is concerned, he might as well be dead already. Except that he doesn’t know how to say goodbye. Helping him is Nova’s biggest challenge yet. She knows she should keep clients at arm’s length. But she and Mason have more in common than either of them could guess… and meeting him might turn out to be the hardest, but also the best thing that’s ever happened to them both.
Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury by Kinley Bryan
1913. A powerful and dangerous storm descends on the Great Lakes, and three sisters find their lives transformed amid the chaos.
Galley cook Sunny Colvin, whose baking skills are exemplary, has her hands full feeding a freighter crew seven days a week, nine months a year. She also has a dream — to open a restaurant back home — but she knows she’ll never convince her husband, the steward, to leave the seafaring life he loves.
Back in their hometown, the second sister, Agnes Inby, mourns her husband, a serviceman who died in an accident she believes she could have prevented. Burdened with regret and longing for more than her job at the dry goods store, Agnes looks for comfort in a secret infatuation.
Two hundred miles away in Cleveland, the youngest sister, Cordelia Blythe, has pinned her hopes for adventure on marriage to a lake freighter captain. Finding herself alone and restless in a new town, she joins her mate on the season’s last trip up the lakes.
On November 8, 1913, a powerful storm descends on the Great Lakes, bringing hurricane-force winds, whiteout blizzard conditions, and mountainous waves that last for days. Amidst all of this, all three sisters are offered glimpses of the clarity they seek, if only they can dare to perceive it.
Daytime Drama by Sarahlyn Bruck
Soap opera star by day, harried, single mom by night, Calliope Hart’s life is a delicate balancing act. When the network cancels her show, Callie’s world crumbles and she must decide whether it’s more important to fight to save the show or to take a risk and start over from scratch.
For 25 years, soap opera fans have known her as Napa Valley’s resident diva, Jessica Sinclair. But at night, Callie is a flustered breadwinner, scrambling to provide for her 12-year-old son and her mother. So when the network announces that her show will be canceled, Callie is beyond shocked — plus, she doesn’t even know who she is anymore. At first, driven by financial concerns for her family that include blackmail payments to her son’s biological father, she rallies fans to save the show. But is this what she really wants?
When she learns that her mother has been driving her son to auditions that Callie has strictly forbidden — and worse, that he’s been offered opportunities — she sees her own child’s youth and drive as competition with her age and experience. Set in modern-day Hollywood, Daytime Drama is a story about having the guts to reach for the sky while being firmly grounded by reality on terra firma.
Ultimately, Callie must decide whether to play it safe or summon the courage her son displays to reinvent her career — and, for the first time, test her mettle as an actress and a mom.
Eleonora and Joseph: Passion, Tragedy, and Revolution in the Age of Enlightenment by Julieta Almeida Rodrigues
Aristocrat Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel pleads with the High Court of Naples to be beheaded instead of hanged like a criminal. One of the leading revolutionaries of her time, she contributed to the establishment of the Neapolitan Republic which was based on the ideals of the French Revolution.
Imprisoned in 1799 after the return of the Bourbon Monarchy as the result of her work as editor-in-chief of Il Monitore Napoletano, she writes a memoir while awaiting her sentence. In it she discusses not only her revolutionary enthusiasm, but also the adolescent lover who abandoned her, Joseph Correia da Serra.
While visiting Monticello many years later, Joseph discovers Eleonora’s manuscript in Thomas Jefferson’s library. Now retired, Jefferson is committed to founding the University of Virginia and entices Joseph with a position at the institution. As the two philosophes explore Eleonora’s writing through the lens of their own lives, achievements, and follies, they share many intimate secrets.
Told from Eleonora’s and Joseph’s alternating points of view, the reader is transported from the elegant salons of Naples to the halls of Monticello, from the streets of European capitals such as Lisbon, London, and Paris to cultured New World cities like Philadelphia and the chic society and political excitement of Washington, D.C.’s early days. Eleonora and Joseph were both prominent figures of the Southern European Enlightenment. Together with Thomas Jefferson, they formed part of The Republic of Letters, a formidable network of thinkers who radically influenced the intellectual world in which they lived–and one which we still inhabit today.
Waltz In Swing Time by Jill Caugherty
Growing up in a strict Utah farm family during the Great Depression, Irene Larsen copes with her family’s hardship by playing piano. Even after an unthinkable tragedy strikes, Irene clings to her dream of becoming a professional musician. When a neighbor’s farm is foreclosed, Irene’s brother marries the neighbor’s daughter, who moves in with the Larsens and coaches Irene into winning leading roles in musicals.
Clashing with her mother, who dismisses her ambition as a waste of time and urges her to become a farmer’s wife, Irene leaves home. During a summer gig at Zion National Park, where Irene sings in a variety show for Depression-weary tourists, she meets professional dancer Spike, a maverick who might be her ticket to a musical career. But ultimately she must decide whether pursuing this dream justifies its steep price: losing her home and family.
Told in alternating voices between Irene’s ninetieth year in 2006 at an assisted living facility and her coming-of-age in the 1930s, Waltz in Swing Time is a poignant tale of one woman’s journey to forge a fulfilling, independent path.
