Famous in a Small Town

By Viola Shipman aka Wade RouseĀ 

Wade rouse is the internationally bestselling author of nine books, which have been translated into nearly 20 languages. Wade chose his grandmotherā€™s name, Viola Shipman, as a pen name to honor the woman whose heirlooms and family stories inspire his fiction. See the Product Description below for details about this book. Please buy all of your books directly from the author or an independent Michigan bookstore.

Buy book or more from Schuler Books in Grand Rapids.

Product Price $18.99

Product Description

For most of her eighty years, Mary Jackson has endured the steady invasion of tourists, influencers and real estate developers who have discovered the lakeside charm of Good Hart, Michigan, waiting patiently for the arrival of a stranger sheā€™s believed since childhood would not only one day carry on her legacyā€”the Very Cherry General Store ā€”but also break the record she set as a teen to become the first woman to win Michiganā€™s Cherry Pit Spitting Championship, a record that still stands today. Like generations of Jackson women before her, Cherry Mary, as sheā€™s known locally, runs the community hubā€”part post office, bakery and sandwich shopā€”and had almost given up hope that the mysterious prediction sheā€™d been told as a girl would come true and the store would have to pass toā€¦a man.

Becky Thatcher came to Good Hart with her ride-or-die BFF to forget that sheā€™s just turned forty with nothing to show for it. Ending up at the general store with Mary is admittedly not the beach vacation she expected, but the more the feisty octogenarian talks about destiny, the stronger Beckyā€™s memories of her own childhood holidays become, and the strange visions over the lake she was never sure were real. As she works under Maryā€™s wing for the summer and finds she fits into this quirky community of locals, she starts to believe that destiny could be real, and that it might have something very special in mind for Becky.