Bestselling author Viola Shipman delights with this captivating summertime escape set along the sparkling shores of Lake Michigan, where a woman searches for clues to her secretive mother's past
Devastated by the sudden death of her mother—a quiet, loving and intensely private Southern seamstress called Miss Mabel, who overflowed with pearls of Ozarks wisdom but never spoke of her own family—Sutton Douglas makes the impulsive decision to pack up and head north to the Michigan resort town where she believes she’ll find answers to the lifelong questions she’s had about not only her mother’s past but also her own place in the world.
Recalling Miss Mabel’s
sewing notions that were her childhood toys, Sutton buys a collection of
buttons at an estate sale from Bonnie Lyons, the imposing matriarch of the
lakeside community. Propelled by a handful of trinkets left behind by her
mother and glimpses into the history of the magical lakeshore town, Sutton
becomes tantalized by the possibility that Bonnie is the grandmother she never
knew. But is she? As Sutton cautiously befriends Bonnie and is taken into her
confidence, she begins to uncover the secrets about her family that Miss Mabel
so carefully hid, and about the role that Sutton herself unwittingly played in
it all.
VIOLA SHIPMAN is the pen name for internationally bestselling author Wade
Rouse. Wade is the author of fourteen books, which have been translated into 21
languages and sold over a million copies around the world. Wade chose his
grandmother’s name, Viola Shipman as a pen name to honor the woman whose
heirlooms and family stories inspire his fiction. The last
Viola Shipman novel, The Secret of Snow (October 2021), was named a Best Book of Fall by Country
Living Magazine and a Best Holiday Book by Good Housekeeping.
Wade hosts the popular
Facebook Live literary happy hour, “Wine & Words with Wade,” every Thursday
at 6:30 p.m. EST on the Viola Shipman author page where he talks writing,
inspiration and welcomes bestselling authors and publishing insiders.
The Edge of Summer by Viola Shipman is about a woman’s journey to learn more about her family’s history. Sutton Douglas lost her mother to COVID. Her mother was the only family she has left or so she thought. Her mother refused to answer questions about her past except to say she lost everyone in a house fire. Sutton’s mother leaves her a letter that sends her on a quest to learn more. Sutton gives up her job, sells her condo in Chicago, and moves a resort town in Michigan. Sutton is feeling lost since her mother’s death, and she is hoping that learning about the family’s history will help her figure things out. I thought The Edge of Summer was well-written with developed characters. The pacing is slower than I prefer as Sutton deals with her grief, moves, and remembers special times with her mother. Anyone who has suffered a loss or was impacted by COVID will find some of the scenes difficult to read.
The Edge of Summer is an emotional story. We
join Sutton on her quest for information and, hopefully, to find a family
member. We also get to see how Sutton and her mother,
Miss Mabel made it through challenging times.
Sutton’s mother provided her with wisdom that can help guide her
throughout the rest of her life. Buttons
are featured prominently in the story. I
could understand Miss Mabel’s fascination with buttons. There are some unique and beautiful buttons. They have an interesting history. There are good life lessons in this
book. We get to see that a family can be
more than people who are related to you by blood. You can create your own family that consists
of those you love and who love you in return.
The Edge of Summer is a story about secrets, grief, family, truth,
acceptance, friendship, and romance. Pack
your bag for your journey to lovely Lake Michigan in the touching tale The Edge of Summer.
BUTTONHOLE
A small cut in the fabric
that is bound with small stitching. The hole has to be just big enough to allow
a button to pass through it and remain in place.
My mom told everyone my
dad died, along with my entire family—grandparents, aunts, uncles, and all—one
Christmas Day long ago.
“Fire,” she’d say.
“Woodstove. Took ’em all. Down to the last cousin.”
“How’d you make it out
with your little girl?” everyone would always ask, eyes wide, mouths open.
“That’s a holiday miracle!”
My mom would start to cry,
a tear that grew to a flood, and, well, that would end that.
No
one questioned someone who survived such a thing, especially a widowed mother
like Miss Mabel, which is what everyone called her out of deference in the
Ozarks. Folks down here had lived hard lives, and they buried their kin just
like they did their heartache, underneath the rocky earth and red clay. It took
too much effort to dig that deep.
That’s
why no one ever bothered to check out the story of a simple, hardworking,
down-to-earth, churchgoing lady who kept to herself down here in the
hollers—despite the fact me and my mom both just appeared out of thin air—in a
time before social media existed.
But I
did.
Want to
know why?
My mom never
cried.
She was
the least emotional soul I’d ever known.
“How did
you make it out with me?” I asked her countless times as I grew older, when
it was just the two of us sitting in her sewing room in our tiny cabin tucked
amongst the bluffs outside Nevermore, Missouri.
She would
never answer immediately, no matter how many times I asked. Instead, she’d turn
over one of her button jars or tins, and run her fingers through the buttons as
if they were tarot cards that would provide a clue.
I mean,
there were no photos, no memories, no footsteps that even led from our fiery
escape to the middle of Nevermore. No family wondered where we were? No one
cared? My mother made it out with nothing but me? Not a penny to her
name? Just some buttons?
We were
rich in buttons.
Oh, I had
button necklaces in every color growing up— red, green, blue, yellow, white,
pink—and I matched them to every outfit I had. We didn’t have money for trendy
jewelry or clothes—tennis bracelets, Gloria Vanderbilt jeans—so my mom made
nearly everything I wore.
Kids made fun of me at school for that.
“Sutton,
the button girl!” they’d taunt me. “Hand-me-downs!”
Wasn’t
funny. Ozarks kids weren’t clever. Just annoyingly direct, like the skeeters
that constantly buzzed my head.
I loved
my necklaces, though. They were like Wonder Woman’s bracelets. For some reason,
I always felt protected.
I’d
finger and count every button on my necklace waiting for my mom to answer the
question I’d asked long ago. She’d just keep searching those buttons, turning
them round and round, feeling them, whispering to them, as if they were alive
and breathing. The quiet would nearly undo me. A girl should have music and
friends’ laughter be the soundtrack of her life, not the clink of buttons and
rush of the creek. Most times, I’d spin my button necklace a few times,
counting upward of sixty before my mom would answer.
“Alive!”
she’d finally say, voice firm, without looking up. “That’s how we made it
out…alive. And you should feel darn lucky about that, young lady.”
Then, as
if by magic, my mom would always somehow manage to find a matching button to
replace a missing one on a hand-me-down blouse of hers, or pluck the “purtiest”
ones from the countless buttons in her jar—iridescent abalone or crochet over
wound silk f loss—to make the entire blouse seem new again.
Still,
she would never smile. In fact, it was as if she had been born old. I had no
idea how old she might be: Thirty-five? Fifty? Seventy?
But when
she’d find a beautiful button, she would hold it up to study, her gold eyes
sparkling in the light from the little lamp over Ol’ Betsy, her Singer sewing
machine.
If
I watched her long enough, her face would relax just enough to let the deep
creases sigh, and the edges of her mouth would curl ever so slightly, as if she
had just found the secret to life in her button jar.
“Look at
this beautiful button, Sutton,” she’d say. “So many buttons in this jar:
fabric, shell, glass, metal, ceramic. All forgotten. All with a story. All
from someone and somewhere. People don’t give a whit about buttons anymore, but
I do. They hold value, these things that just get tossed aside. Buttons are
still the one thing that not only hold a garment together but also make it
truly unique.”
Finally, finally,
she’d look at me. Right in the eye.
“Lots of
beauty and secrets in buttons if you just look long and hard enough.”
The way
she said that would make my body explode in goose pimples.
Every
night of my childhood, I’d go to bed and stare at my necklace in the moonlight,
or I’d play with the buttons in my mom’s jar searching for an answer my mother
never provided.
Even
today when I design a beautiful dress with pretty, old-fashioned buttons, I
think of my mom and how the littlest of things can hold us together.
Or tear us apart.
Kris
The Avid Reader
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