Judith Ivey

YA-YAS IN BLOOM reveals the roots of the Ya-Yas' friendship in the 1930s and roars with all the raw power of Vivi Abbott Walker's 1962 T-Bird through sixty years of marriage, child-raising, and hair-raising family secrets.

"A novel of family, Midwestern values, hard work, fate, and the secrets of making a world-class beer, from the author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest. Two sisters, one farm. A family is split when their father leaves their shared inheritance entirely to Helen, his younger daughter. Despite baking award-winning pies at the local nursing home, her older sister, Edith, struggles to make what most people would call a living. So she can't help wondering...

The summer that Hattie turns twelve, she meets the childlike uncle she never knew and becomes friends with a girl who works at the carnival that comes to Hattie's small town. Twelve-year-old Hattie learns that living life fully means facing both the good times and the bad upon the closing of her Uncle Adam's "school"- an institution for the mentally disabled.

Decades after her father kidnapped her from his ex-wife's home to save her from an unstable environment, a young woman struggles to come to terms with her father's criminal action and the deception that forms the foundation of her entire life.

A strong-willed but light-hearted mother delves into a furious debate with her husband over her children's futures. In the course of the heated argument, some devastating family secrets surface and threaten to destroy the marriage.

A remote, hockey-obsessed town populated by 633 of the most eccentric characters you'd ever want to meet, Mystery is the kind of place where nothing ever changes. But then life as they know it gets turned completely upside down when a publicity stunt brings the world-famous New York Rangers to Mystery for a game with the local team of weekend warriors and the whole town rises to meet the challenge of a lifetime.

When Ruby's grandmother goes to visit a new grandchild in Hawaii, nine-year-old Ruby is sure that she will have a lonely, boring summer in Halleluia, Mississippi. After all, what other granddaughter-grandmother duo would drive the getaway car for chickens rescued from the slaughterhouse, or paint a house shocking pink? Instead, Ruby makes a new friend, saves the school play, writes plenty of letters to her favorite grandmother...and finally learns...