What's Your Favorite? by Liz Flaherty

Let's talk about favorites. I don't use that term lightly. I have a favorite oldest kid, middle kid, and youngest kid--same with kids-in-law and the grands. (Each of the seven grands thinks she or he is my favorite and guess what--they're all right!) While I relate better to some than to others--and they to me--the love is unconditional and all its cups are full.

Not so much with books. Either the ones I've written or the ones I've read. 

My favorites from when I was a kid are Little Women and Understood Betsy. Really, they are. But then I think of the Little House books, Caddie Woodlawn, and Away Goes Sally and how they made me feel, and...no...I can't choose a favorite.

When I was in junior high and high school, I spent a lot more time reading Betty Cavanna and Janet Lambert than I did school books. Oh, and Rosamund du Jardin and Anne Emory and Elisabeth Hamilton Friermood. And every word Mary Stewart wrote. Surely among those, there is a favorite, isn't there? No, more likely 50 of them.

Then came Harlequin...and Candlelight...and Silhouette...and Loveswept...and a long list of other publishers and imprints who published books by women, about women, for women. Like most everyone here, I've read hundreds of them. I occasionally re-read Muriel Jensen's category romances and others by Betty Neels, Jenny Crusie, Nora Roberts, and Kathleen Gilles Seidel. And more. 

It is easier with my own books, although it took years for me to figure out that it was okay to have favorites. Just because they're mine doesn't mean they have to be anyone else's. One More Summer is my favorite. It took 83 days to write and 10 years to sell to a publisher. It's still sells and I still ache over the writing of it. I'm an emotional writer anyway, and that story pushed every single button.

But I have a few that share second place, and most of them are ones written about older protagonists, because I can feel where they are and who they are. One exception to that is The Happiness Pact. Like One More Summer, its story included clinical depression. But they survive and they thrive, 

A Soft Place to Fall is about family and quilting and rearranging the pieces of a long marriage gone wrong. It is another one that pushed all the buttons. I kind of think Early McGrath was me...only better. 

The truth, the ones I've chosen here--both the read and the written--are the favorites of the day. Tomorrow it will be books by Cheryl Reavis, Nan Reinhardt, and Cheryl St. John. But which ones? Hmmm...

Want to share your favorites? We'd love to see them. 

~*~*~

Early McGrath doesn't want freedom from her thirty-year marriage to Nash, but when it's forced upon her, she does the only thing she knows to do - she goes home to the Ridge to reinvent herself.

Only what is someone who's spent her life taking care of other people supposed to do when no one needs her anymore? Even as the threads of her life unravel, she finds new ones - reconnecting with the church of her childhood, building the quilt shop that has been a long-time dream, and forging a new friendship with her former husband.

The definition of freedom changes when it's combined with faith, and through it all perhaps Early and Nash can find A Soft Place to Fall.

Amazon: https://a.co/d/e0zSQ4t

Everywhere Else: https://books2read.com/u/bW57yx