Tag: Kindle

Variety is the Spice of Life by Sally Cronin

I have long been a fan of Sally Cronin’s writing, so it was with great enthusiasm that I read her November 2022 release, Variety is the Spice of Life, whose title is delightfully appropriate for the assembly of poetry and prose that covers a range of topics.

In Ms. Cronin’s author introduction, she states the essence of her book’s intention, “In this latest collection of poetry and short stories I have attempted to capture the beauty and raw power of nature, and the resilience of humans as they face a modern world of change and disruption.” The author does that and more, and the entirety of this book is a breath of fresh air replete with creative nuance.

The book begins with a series of soul-stirring poems—each short, pithy, and inspirational enough to serve as its own existential meditation. In Expeditions we are encouraged to “ignore those who say it’s foolish to try to reach for the stars,” and in Bear Witness, we are asked to consider the plight of the immigrant, “do not look away, bear witness to tragedy, give deepest respect…do not become complacent.” In Lullaby, Ms. Cronin sings the praises of women, by musing on the different voices used to sooth an infant, “but words that mothers sing to babies all around the world loving.”  

#17 in Variety is the Spice of Life reads as a first-person essay, in which the author shares her experience with DNA Ancestral testing. Written in unembellished prose, it’s a beautiful, confessional piece that fittingly precedes the Choka, Origins, in which the author muses on her own genetic line that ends with  powerful impact. In another treatise on family, Face in the Mirror, culminates in the realization, “I’ve morphed into my mother.”

Rounding out the poems is a series titled, A Snapshot from My Garden, and those of us who have followed the author for years know well of the celebrated setting. Ireland is captured in The Colour of Life, and in The Robin—Size Doesn’t Matter, a red robin is declared “the garden’s emperor.” A life span is metaphorically depicted in Blossom, and the series closes with an individual look at bees, butterflies, doves, and cats. 

Ms. Cronin brings her unique voice to eight delightful short stories. Her craft is economic and straight forward, striking an overall tone in a momentum pairing bright language with broad strokes. Her small-town settings are atmospheric and depict character as place, her subjects are humanistic and appeal to animal lovers, nature lovers, and those who applaud a well-deserved sense of cosmic comeuppance.  

In The Neighborhood Watch, a cat has the last word. In The Green Hill an elderly couple’s day out in a windswept, coastal region has a sense of the uncanny, and in On the Run, a frozen foods employee living under an assumed identity sees her turbulent past brought to justice.

Variety is the Spice of Life by Sally Cronin is a well-balanced, uplifting collection of poetry and prose both poignant and entertaining. It’s a thoughtful and satisfying book that casts a light on the best of human nature.

Variety is the Spice of Life is available on Kindle!

The Author, Sally Cronin

Sally Cronin is the author of sixteen books including her memoir Size Matters: Especially when you weigh 330lb first published in 2001. This has been followed by another fifteen books both fiction and non-fiction including multi-genre collections of short stories and poetry.

As an author she understands how important it is to have support in marketing books and offers a number of FREE promotional opportunities on her blog and across her social media. The Smorgasbord Bookshelf My blog is https://smorgasbordinvitation.wordpress.com

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63362080-variety-is-the-spice-of-life?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=I4AxOvUnDe&rank=1

One Year Anniversary of Little Tea’s Release!

Firefly Southern Fiction is running an e-book promotion this week, so if you haven’t read Little tea, for this week only, you can acquire Little Tea for .99 cents!

Here’s what you need to know about Little Tea:

Southern Culture … Old Friendships … Family Tragedy

One phone call from Renny to come home and “see about” the capricious Ava and Celia Wakefield decides to overlook her distressful past in the name of friendship.

For three reflective days at Renny’s lake house in Heber Springs, Arkansas, the three childhood friends reunite and examine life, love, marriage, and the ties that bind, even though Celia’s personal story has yet to be healed. When the past arrives at the lake house door in the form of her old boyfriend, Celia must revisit the life she’d tried to outrun.

As her idyllic coming of age alongside her best friend, Little Tea, on her family’s ancestral grounds in bucolic Como, Mississippi unfolds, Celia realizes there is no better place to accept her own story than in this circle of friends who have remained beside her throughout the years. Theirs is a friendship that can talk any life sorrow into a comic tragedy, and now that the racial divide in the Deep South has evolved, Celia wonders if friendship can triumph over history.

Women’s Fiction Momma5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended Reviewed in the United States. Verified Purchase Claire Fullerton has stolen my heart with lyrical prose and a deep understanding of family, friendship, and how history shapes us in Little Tea. Through the story of Celia and Little Tea, two incredible young women who dare to defy convention, readers are quickly swept up in a story of a 1980’s South that is hanging on to its roots by a thread. At times, the story made me feel the deep friendships similar to those in The Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood, but at others the tension resting just below the surface of this original story kept me turning the pages to learn what would happen. Fullerton’s depth of understanding when it comes to the relationships between Celia’s and Little Tea’s family ties will break your heart, and then all at once make it sing. Highly recommended.

5.0 out of 5 stars Southern Fiction at its BestReviewed in the United States. Southern fiction has always fascinated me for its evocation of that culture and language, the iconic characters and descriptions of environments. Claire Fullerton’s Little Tea more than satisfies a reader’s fascination with world she creates in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. In the way we all try to look back to make sense of how we’ve gotten to where we are approaching middle age, three childhood BFF gather and move forward the narrative of their connections. Race, family ties, mental illness and ambition are the themes that bind and inform this story with conflict, history and ultimately love. A wonderful story beautifully told.

Little Tea Book Awards:

1st Place Outstanding Literary/General Fiction The Independent Authors Network

2nd place Book of the Year: The Independent Authors Network

Gold Medal Winner in Southern Fiction: Readers’ Favorite

1st Place in the Chanticleer Reviews Somerset Awards for Literary Fiction

The Pulpwood Queens August Book Club Selection

Deep South Magazine’s 2020 Summer Reading list 

Featured in Mississippi Magazine

Finalist in the International Book Awards

Finalist in the 2020 Kindle Book Awards. 

Jennifer ~ TarHeelReader rated it it was amazingI just click with author Claire Fullerton’s writing. I loved Little Tea just as much as Mourning Dove. She knows how to weave a southern tale.

Renny, Ava, and Celia have been friends since childhood, but they haven’t seen each other in ten years. They reunite at Renny’s lake house in Arkansas with much-needed time together commiserating and catching up.

Something happens that changes the tone of the weekend. Celia’s old boyfriend visits the lake house and causes the women to address the past.

Told in two timelines, the present and the 1980s, the story begins for these three friends. The deep south in which they grew up is not as pretty as it appears. Race and class issues are addressed with a profound but gentle hand.

Bottom line, I absolutely adored this story of friendship and how the remarkable bond of these strong women persevered over a long period of time.

Billy O’Callaghan rated it it was amazing “There’s a damp, verdant feel to Olive Branch, Mississippi, in the summertime. From the side of the road, everything is a chiaroscuro of overgrown, tangled green. Moss drips sultry from kudzu-covered oaks, shading twists of the road in canopies of diamond-dappled sunlight. The world there is flat, expansive, and quiet, evoking a mood both eerie and somber.” (from Little Tea)
Claire Fullerton has an enviably light touch, a lilting style that carries shades of Pat Conroy and tinges of Anne Tyler while managing to be be wonderfully of itself. Little Tea is a triumph – a meditation on friendship that’s gentle, emotive and, above all, wise. This is a writer who knows the heart, and the world around it, and most importantly, knows how to tell a good story.

You can get Little Tea’s E-book Here: https://www.amazon.com/Little-Tea-Claire-Fullerton-ebook/dp/B0817J667Y/ref=sr_1_1?crid=339KRYTUR5R75&keywords=little+tea+by+claire+fullerton&qid=1578767812&sprefix=Little+tea%2Caps%2C191&sr=8-1

https://linktr.ee/cffullerton

Through an Autumn Window: a Novella

At the end of 2017, Eva Marie Everson, the acquisitions editor of Firefly Southern Fiction, asked me if I’d be interested in writing a novella to contribute to a book titled, A Southern Season: Four Stories from a Front Porch Swing, scheduled for release in November 2018. At the time, I’d never tried my hand at writing a novella, and my novel, Mourning Dove, was scheduled for release in June of 2018. Thinking I’d be overwhelmed with my pending workload, I was hesitant to commit to the project, until I was given the project’s tempting guidelines: write any story you want to, as long as it’s set in the South during one of the four seasons. Right off the bat, I started thinking about the one season that bypasses California completely, and by this, I refer to the fall. I thought trying my hand at writing something I’d never attempted would be a great opportunity to stretch as a writer, and if you know anything about Southerners, you know they never tire of talking about the South. I said yes to Eva Marie, though at the time, I hadn’t arrived at my novella’s subject. But then kismet came into play when I got a phone call from a particular elderly gentleman in the Delta, who called to tell me about a mutual acquaintance of ours who had recently died. Our conversation was all over the place, beginning with how this person had died ( old age,) dovetailing into where the funeral would take place ( probably Memphis’s Independent Presbyterian Church,) who would, no doubt, attend ( everybody and their brother,) and which Memphis cemetery would serve as the final resting place (Elmwood, or Memorial Park.) Now then, I can only report that the way this particular Delta gentleman tells a story is so chock-full of laser-sharp cultural nuance that the second he got to his perfectly timed punchline ( though it was probably unbeknownst to him,) I knew I had the subject for my novella. Here is the gentleman’s artfully delivered line that spawned my novella:

“The one thing I know about a Southern funeral is something always goes wrong.”

I had a blast writing the novella I ultimately contributed to A Southern Season. I titled it Through an Autumn Window and set it during the three-day rites of a Memphis funeral, where not just one but many things go wrong. You’ll be happy to learn I hit the word count for the novella ( 20,000 words) right on its head. In Through an Autumn Window, I wrote about a long-festering, contentious dynamic between two siblings, even as both carried forth during their mother’s funeral trying to “do the right thing” in an effort at “keeping up appearances,” during their life-altering grief.

Here’s the good news: for the next five days, A Southern Season is free on Kindle. You can get it now by clicking on this link:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GDZ9WF5

https:clairefullerton.com

The Headmaster’s Darlings by Katherine Clark Book Review

Oh, the sheer joy of this book, which is not outweighed in the least by the rarity of coming across a writer with complete command of language and craft. The Headmaster’s Darlings has so much excellence going on that it’s a challenge for me to know where to slather my gushing praise first! Within its 245 pages of the tightest, page-turning story I’ve read in as long as I can remember, there is comedy, sarcasm, heart-tugging sentimentality, social commentary, and suspense to the point where, when I wasn’t laughing out loud over Katherine Clark’s spot-on Southern cultural insight, I was re-reading her laser-sharp paragraphs as if they were a writer’s tutorial. Crisp, clever, economic sentences lead the reader through the story of the obese Norman Laney, a beloved high school teacher in Birmingham, Alabama, whose job lays in the balance of rumor and false accusation. But it is 1980’s Birmingham society that is judge, jury and executioner, and Norman Laney knows how to game the system. So wise to the eccentricities of an insular, antiquated, upper-class society, Norman Laney beats them at
their own game by being one of them. He is both fish-out-of-water and ruler of the roost in a story that is part comedy of manners and part
emperor’s new clothes. It is not so much the story as the telling of the story that makes or breaks a book for me. Kathrine Clark gives us her all, nay, way more than we expect in sardonically laying bare the mind frame of Birmingham, Alabama’s cloistered elitist society, whose aspirations are maintaining the status quo. Yet Norman Laney is a teacher of principle and integrity, in the field for all the right reasons, which he has to keep under wraps, lest he startle society’s neat and resistant grid of logic by which it defines itself. Written in a tone that both laughs and bites at the nuances of Southern society, there is an undercurrent of nonjudgmental acceptance of a culture as old as the hills as it seeks to raise its next generation in a manner that aspires to keeping it so. Yet it is Norman Laney’s aim to teach his students to aspire to at least something by reaching beyond themselves, and he must lead by appeasing Birmingham’s old guard as he acts as guidance counselor to their offspring. The Headmaster’s Darlings is more than a comedic social commentary on a staid Southern mentality that will be its own hubris in the end; the book doles out a lure that shows the way out, and slips it in undetected from the cunning lead of one impressionable teacher, who knows his way around covert maneuver. I understand there are two more books behind this one. My hand hovers in anticipatory wait over my Kindle.