Paperback, 256 pages
Published
January 1st 2013
by Simon & Schuster
Genre: women's fiction, chick lit, contemporary novel, romance
Rating: 4 stars
Middle aged and recent
divorcee Ellen McClarety decides to open a kringle bakery in Amelia, small town
Wisconsin: the rhythmic routine of running a shop and the heartwarming smell of
handmade goodness help Ellen to ease her mind and her worries. The simple
repetition of the rituals involved in the craft of the delicious Danish pastry
becomes for the former university secretary a creative outlet and a healing
mantra to escape the bitterness of her failed marriage and divorce.
“Perhaps the divorce would be the catalyst she needed to begin the life
she was meant to live.”
Ellen becomes romantically
involved with one of her customers, shy widower Henry Moon. Maybe the intensity
of her feelings for him doesn’t match the sweeping romance she experienced with
her more adventurous and unreliable ex-husband, but she will find in the quiet
man an unsuspected connection and, in the serendipity of their relationship, the
key to put the past behind her back once and for all.
Meanwhile her younger
sister, Lanie Taylor, juggles motherhood and a demanding career as a divorce
lawyer, not without doubts and concerns of her own: under the pressure of their
jobs and parenthood, Lanie and her husband Rob encounter a rough patch in their
marriage and they both start wondering when they will ever give themselves free
license to live their lives fully. Both Ellen and Lanie long for their deceased
mother’s guidance, but through twists of fate and the intervention of
serendipity, they’ll find out that the
biggest piece of life advice their mother left for them is locked in the very
recipe to bake perfect kringles:
“It’s all about balance, […]. Just like in a good kringle, no one
ingredient should overwhelm another.”
In this ‘slow burn’ novel
by Wendy Francis, the traditional
Danish pastry becomes the metaphor of a perfect life and, as it usually happens
when the setting of a novel is a quaint little town, the small community with
its charming environment is a character in itself. In Three Good Things events unfold at a
very languid pace and now and then the narration shifts its focus between Lanie’s
and Ellen’s story threads, offering a very placid portrait of two women at a
turning point in their lives. I wouldn’t classify Francis’ debut novel as fluffy chick
lit, for the saving grace of this slow-paced and sometimes contrived storyline
is in the final plot twist. Overall, this delicate confection was a
satisfactory read.
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