This was an enjoyable read. It is nice to see an older main character. Georgia, who is in her early 50's thought she was going to the grocery store, however something just gave way and she decided to take a trip in her dead husband's favorite car. She ends up in Sedona, Arizona where she meets Trish and Zoe. They become fast friends in spite of their age differences. Some of the plot points were a bit contrived, however it did not detract from the story overly much. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who likes stories about family, love, and friendship. ( )

Charming tale of a widow "growing up". ( )

One by this author is enough.
If you just want to waste a few hours on light reading that makes no demands on you, perhaps this is the book for you. Quoting Amazon from Sherry Hartzler's author page, she "is a novelist, gifted in the art of mainstream women's fiction". I wasn't looking for "mainstream women's fiction" when I selected this. That isn't really a strong interest of mine. I was more interested in possible regional flavor since I've visited Sedona and love the town and its surroundings, and the desert southwest in general. My overall reaction to the book was, I'm afraid, colored by my disappointment over how little of that hoped for flavor was in the book. The story could as easily have played out in any other small town in the southwest as in Sedona for the almost complete absence of insight into the local culture or description of the amazing physical surroundings that shape that culture in the book.

In terms of storyline, this book is all over the map. There are elements of a typical journey of personal discovery on the part of the protagonist, Georgia Mae Brown; of female bonding among the three primary characters, Georgia, Trish, and Zoe; of tormented souls with dark family secrets; of picaresque adventures; of romances, both easy and difficult; of family dynamics. The list goes on and on. Too much, really for such light-weight reading.

The book follows the arc of Georgia Mae Brown's life for the period of slightly more than one year from the time this fifty-something year old widow, whose husband died in the arms of his much younger mistress in a particularly public and humiliating way, decides she "can't take it anymore" and runs away from a life that is both stifling and bewildering, until partly with her help all the people she meets along the way achieve happy endings, or beginnings, for their lives, along with Georgia herself, of course.

Georgia's journey begins when an impulse to drive, for the very first time, her late husband's beloved vintage Fleetwood convertible carries her, inexplicably to herself, onto the freeway, out of town (Columbus, Ohio), out of a life of constraint, in which pressures mainly from her adult children keep her from coming to terms with her recent bereavement and anger over her husband's death. Completely spontaneous and seemingly out of character (her children think she's lost her mind), the journey gathers steam with each chance encounter she experiences until she forms a resolution to drive to Sedona, with no fixed plan for what to do when she arrives. In the course of the trip, the reader learns that Georgia is someone who is fundamentally open to new experiences, though she doesn't realize that herself, and that she possesses to an extraordinary degree an ability to affect the people around her in positive ways.

This trait is evident immediately upon her arrival in Sedona, when by chance she walks into the Soft Rock Cafe, owned by Trish, a young woman who can't cook. Doc, a handsome widowed retired doctor/rancher, grandfather of Mary Jo, who works at the cafe and is a worse cook than Trish, just happens to be the only customer at the time, and observes with rapidly diminishing impartiality Georgia's arrival. After leaving the cafe, Georgia wanders into the Moon Tide looking for gifts for family members, mementos of what she believes will be a brief visit in Sedona, and meets Zoe, the shop's owner who just happens to be the adopted daughter of a famous Hollywood star who now suffers from dementia. Before the day ends, Georgia has wangled part-time jobs at both the cafe and the gift shop. In a few short hours she has met, and begun to reshape the lives of the three main characters besides herself. I agree with you if you think the rapid pace of these developments is more than a little unrealistic.

The remainder of the book involves revelations about the past and current lives of Trish and Zoe, decisions by Georgia for dealing with her children's unreasonable expectations and for cutting her ties to a life she no longer wants to lead back in Columbus, and developments in romances for Zoe, Trish, and Georgia. Everyone gets a happy ending, and Georgia gets a new life as owner of both the cafe and gift shop in Sedona.

The book, though written in the third person, is entirely from Georgia's point of view. She literally occupies every scene. I found the author's style overly descriptive of trivialities, and overly burdened by misuse of words and by ungrammatical constructions. There were, for example, a few dozen more descriptions of people pouring and drinking coffee and tea than were needed to move the plot along. I also found the development of Georgia's romance with Doc unconvincing. I actually think the book would have been better if that thread in Georgia's story had been left for the reader to imagine as a future possibility. Let the reader feel that the amazing life journey Georgia had begun was still evolving as the book ends.

I'm not sorry I read this book; I'm just not enamored of the author's style of writing or her approach to character and plot development. I'm not interested in reading any more of her books. ( )