Small Blessings: A Novel
Aug 2014 · Macmillan + ORM
3.7star
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Ebook
321
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About this ebook
A small-town college professor meets the ten-year-old son he never knew he had: “This warm, wise tale leaves a smile long after the final page is turned.” —People
Tom Putnam has resigned himself to a quiet and half-fulfilled life. An English professor in a sleepy college town, he spends his days browsing the Shakespeare shelves at the campus bookstore, managing the oddball faculty in his department, and caring, alongside his formidable mother-in-law, for his wife Marjory, a fragile shut-in with unrelenting neuroses, a condition exacerbated by her discovery of Tom’s brief and misguided affair with a visiting poetess a decade earlier.
Then, one evening at the bookstore, Tom and Marjory meet Rose Callahan, the shop’s charming new hire, and Marjory invites Rose to their home for dinner, out of the blue, her first social interaction since her breakdown. Tom wonders if it’s a sign that change is on the horizon, a feeling confirmed upon his return home, where he opens a letter from his former paramour informing him he’d fathered a son—who is, at the moment, heading Tom’s way on a train . . .
A heartwarming story with a charmingly imperfect cast of characters to cheer for, Small Blessings reminds us that sometimes, when it feels like life has veered irrevocably off track, the track shifts in ways we never could have imagined.
“Thoroughly entertaining.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“A delightful and splendidly intelligent comedy.” —Margot Livesey, New York Times–bestselling author of The Road from Belhaven
Tom Putnam has resigned himself to a quiet and half-fulfilled life. An English professor in a sleepy college town, he spends his days browsing the Shakespeare shelves at the campus bookstore, managing the oddball faculty in his department, and caring, alongside his formidable mother-in-law, for his wife Marjory, a fragile shut-in with unrelenting neuroses, a condition exacerbated by her discovery of Tom’s brief and misguided affair with a visiting poetess a decade earlier.
Then, one evening at the bookstore, Tom and Marjory meet Rose Callahan, the shop’s charming new hire, and Marjory invites Rose to their home for dinner, out of the blue, her first social interaction since her breakdown. Tom wonders if it’s a sign that change is on the horizon, a feeling confirmed upon his return home, where he opens a letter from his former paramour informing him he’d fathered a son—who is, at the moment, heading Tom’s way on a train . . .
A heartwarming story with a charmingly imperfect cast of characters to cheer for, Small Blessings reminds us that sometimes, when it feels like life has veered irrevocably off track, the track shifts in ways we never could have imagined.
“Thoroughly entertaining.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“A delightful and splendidly intelligent comedy.” —Margot Livesey, New York Times–bestselling author of The Road from Belhaven
Ratings and reviews
3.7
10 reviews
Corina Holder
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September 2, 2014
Entertaining fun vacation read. Look forward to the authors next book.
2 people found this review helpful
Kate Coberly
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May 15, 2015
Over the top in dramatic action, but delightfully so - wise, warm and wonderful!
1 person found this review helpful
About the author
MARTHA WOODROOF was born in the South, went to boarding school and college in New England, ran away to Texas for a while, then fetched up in Virginia. She has written for NPR, npr.org, Marketplace and Weekend America, and for the Virginia Foundation for Humanities Radio Feature Bureau. Her print essays have appeared in such newspapers as the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Small Blessings is her debut novel. She lives with her husband in the Shenandoah Valley. Their closest neighbors are cows.
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