This book wasn't for me. It honestly never even got opened past page 22. You win some, you lose some.

An adventure into the lives of interesting people in a small college town and the way their lives are changed when a series of events unfolds that touches on them all. ( )

Received from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'm kind of in love with every single thing about this book. ( )

Embarking on a road trip is unfathomable without an audiobook to pass the long, boring driving hours across the very large State of Texas, and I don’t always end up with one I want to listen to for 10 hours. This past weekend, however, I totally lucked out and listened to Martha Woodroof’s Small Blessings, narrated by the incomparable Lorelei King.

I happen to really enjoy campus stories, so my antenna went up when I read the summary of this novel. It’s set on a small college campus and populated by the most amazing characters. Tom Putnam is an English professor, married for two decades to a fragile woman with a mental illness, and he just barely gets through the day with the help of his mother-in-law, Agnes. He had a 9 day affair ten years ago with a visiting poetess which sent his wife, Marjorie, off the deep end; and he learned his lesson about trying to have a life different from the one he is trapped in. Tom has a friend, Russell, who is a blow-hard and recovering alcoholic, and who lives to torment the cranky, aggressive Iris, a professor with some addiction issues of her own.

One day a woman named Rose Callahan arrives to manage the college bookshop, a little boy named Henry arrives on a train claiming to be Tom’s son, and none of the characters in this story will ever be the same. Filled with entertaining prose, snappy dialogue, extremely well-developed characters, and a hint of mystery, Small Blessings will just steal your heart right out of your chest.

Listening to the narrative on my road-trip had me nodding my head, smirking, huffing with laughter, and it squeezed my heart with profoundness, as well. It reminded me that when life seems to be going off the rail, that new direction might be the one we’re supposed to be on after all. I need more stories like this one! ( )

I think I 'm missing something here. Midway through the book, I checked to see if it was self-published because it seemed too amateurish. (It isn't. Self-published, that is). I think the book is sort of aiming for madcap farce, but it doesn't really carry-through. Certainly the events are farcical, but the whole thing falls flat. The characters themselves are very one-dimensional and not very believable especially in the events they face. It is the start of a new school year on a small, unnamed college campus in Charlottesville and in the space of the first week of school, Professor Tom Putnam's mentally ill wife Marjory dies, Rose Callahan comes to work in the school bookstore as a "community builder" and Tom learns he has a young son, Henry through a brief affair, and Henry is arriving alone by train imminently and the mother/mistress is not to be contacted. Putnam takes all this upheaval in his life at completely surface level. The arrival of Rose is supposed to be some harbinger of magical change, like Mary Poppins...she is the only one Marjory responds to in 20 years of awkward social interaction -- before she drives her car off a cliff, that is. Things just don't add up and they also don't ring true. Add in a couple wacky minor characters, Iris Benson, the resident feminist scholar/professor who turns everything into an issue, and Russell Jacobs, the fop-ish old school, tweed, elbow-patch professor, who both happen to be raging alcoholics at some point in the story, and Tom's tough-as-nails, but big-hearted mother-in-law/lawyer, Agnes Tattle and the story is stretched in too many directions to stick with any conviction. The good news is a happy ending if you can guess what that would be with all the balls in the air, which the author manages, just barely not to drop. ( )