APRIL 2025 BOOKERS MINUTES &
MUSINGS
The Keeper of Happy Endings, Barbara Davis
“The magic is as wide as a smile and as
narrow as a wink, loud as laughter and quiet as a tear, tall as a tale and deep
as emotion. So strong, it can lift the spirit. So gentle, it can touch the
heart. It is the magic that begins the happily ever after.” Walt Disney
17 Bookers
met at the home of Debby Stein on April 8th to discuss this month’s
selection. We welcomed two new members, Rita Brei and Ellie Bomar, to the group
and hope to see them again next month.
Please
note our annual “Wine & Cheese” evening May meeting has been moved
to Tuesday, May 20th, 5:30 p.m. at the home of Jane Shaw, 116 White
Cap Lane, Pinnacle Golf Club. Our food and beverage coordinator, Kim Nalls, was
not here today but she sent me an email suggesting we ask everyone to bring
their favorite “heavy appetizer” and their drink of choice. After the first
round of sign-ups, she may ask for other things to complement the selections
and/or we can add extras like fruit or desserts at the appropriate time. Kim
will be sending an email soon. Any questions should be directed to her @ kimLnalls01@gmail.com.
Business
Bookers
has a table for eight (Tonya Guillamun, Jane Shaw, Patty Evans, Kat Mackey, Virginia
Gandy, Janet Starkweather, Sherry Wood, and me) reserved for the Books and
Bloom event ($62.50 each) on April 25th, at Athens Country Club. Kat
has taken the lead on creating our tablescape for the event and we’ll be
meeting soon to coordinate how we want to decorate. Stay tuned.
We
received a thank you letter from The Center for the Arts & Sciences for our
$50.00 donation which will be added to the Brazosport Fine Arts Council’s
Endowment Fund in memory of Marcie Allen.
Sunshine
It was
good to see Lee McFarlane today and we are glad her health is improving and
hope our hostess today, Debbie Stein, continues to make progress after her recent
knee surgery. Patty Evans was also able to attend as hubby, Barry, is now home
recuperating from pancreatitis.
Synopsis
Soline
Roussel is well schooled in the business of happy endings. For generations her
family has kept an exclusive bridal salon in Paris, where magic is worked with
needle and thread. It’s said that the bride who wears a Roussel gown is guaranteed
a lifetime of joy. But devastating losses during World War II leave Soline’s
world and heart in ruins and her faith in love shaken. She boxes up her
memories, stowing them away, along with her broken dreams, determined to
forget.
Decades later, while coping with her own tragic loss, aspiring gallery owner
Rory Grant leases Soline’s old property and discovers a box containing letters,
a man’s monogrammed shaving kit, and a vintage wedding dress, never worn. When
Rory returns the mementos, an unlikely friendship develops, and eerie parallels
in Rory’s and Soline’s lives begin to surface. It’s clear that they were
destined to meet—and that Rory may hold the key to righting a forty-year wrong
and opening the door to shared healing and, perhaps, a little magic.
This is a
beautiful story of two heartbroken women whose lives are magically woven
together when their worlds meet at a crucial time in each of their lives. Soline
and Rory reach out from the pages and touch the hearts of readers in an
uplifting novel that explores the importance of hope, the magic of
storytelling, and the transformative power of literature.
About the Author
Barbara
Davis is a Jersey girl raised in the south, now living and writing in New
England and living her dream. After fifteen years of wearing heels and
schlepping a briefcase as an executive in the jewelry industry, she traded in her
pinstripes for a little peace of mind and decided to follow her dream of
becoming a women’s fiction author. Six books later, she’s still pinching
herself maybe because she believes in miracles, in happy endings and new
beginnings.
She’s
blessed to be married to her best friend and soul mate, Tom, who sets the bar
pretty high for her on-page heroes. They have a lovely twenty-year-old ginger
cat named Simon who she says is “wretchedly spoiled and doesn’t give a fig if
she’s on deadline or not.” When not making up stories she can be found reading,
cooking, and watching college football. (Go Gators!)
Author Insights into the writing of
this novel
She says
her source of inspiration for writing this novel initially was to focus on
wedding dresses and the role they play in the wearers happily-ever-after. That
evolved further into a family of women whose calling it was to make dresses
that guaranteed their brides happy endings while continuously being denied
their own, and it details how often women are conditioned to repeat their
mother’s stories and what it might be like to break that mold.
Paris was
a natural setting for exclusive wedding dress salons and including the American
Hospital there which remained open throughout the war and played a vital role
in the resistance movement was a fitting backdrop for a love affair between
Soline and Anson. A little-known heroic story of a real-life Maine born
physician – Dr. Sumner Jackson – vowed no German soldier would be cared for on
his watch and he kept his word while smuggling downed French and Allied airmen
to safety via the underground. The author put Soline and Anson in this hospital
to shine a light on his heroic actions.
The
American Field Service drivers during WWII were not soldiers and rarely carried
weapons. They were required to pay their own way, supply their own uniforms and
equipment and at times even buy their own ambulances and perform their own
vehicle maintenance. Because of these financial burdens, most volunteers were
young men from wealthy families who abandoned their academic careers to
volunteer. Anson’s character fits this profile to a tee. Another entity that were
often in areas of armed conflict, natural disasters and areas of unrest,
Doctors Without Borders, was accurately portrayed with Hux’s character and the inability
to locate his whereabouts mirrored the difficulty in communication infrastructure,
often relying on trustworthy locals to find and negotiate the release of
hostages.
She also
knew the exact building in Boston she wanted for Soline’s bridal shop/Rory’s
gallery. None of the characters were based on real people. She creates a “base”
character profile and discovers who they are as the story unfolds. From personal
knowledge, parts of the story that deals with women often falling into the
patterns of the women who raised them was based on her experiences. “We’re not
always taught to want more, expect more, believe in the idea that we could
actually have more…but worse, we’re rarely taught that we deserve more.” In her
family, women were subservient…existing only to obey and produce, to marry and
raise children, and let the man make the decisions. She was the first woman to
break that mold and was met with stiff resistance as she moved further out of
her and their comfort zones. Each female character in The Keeper of Happy
Endings dealt with similar resistance and each had to make a conscious
decision to pursue the life they wanted for themselves.
Discussion
Most read
and finished the novel and either liked or loved it with a few on the fence. The
character’s names, Soline and Aurora (Rory) complemented each other as both signify
new beginnings – Soline meaning sunbeam and Aurora meaning dawn – both
conjuring images of warmth, brightness and joy as each evolved to discover
their happy endings. We talked about our favorite and least liked characters
and how each one developed throughout the story. One of the themes of the novel
was hope. Soline lost all hope when Anson was presumed dead; their child dying
shortly after she was born; and the fire that robbed her of the ability to
pursue dressmaking because of severe burns to her hands. The dance between fate
and free will was a prevalent thread as fate threw Soline into the lives of
Camilla and Rory to broker peace. Our conversation turned to the relationship
between mother and daughter (Camilla and Rory), what caused each to react to
the other as they navigated through an emotional roller-coaster, and the
happy-ever-after conclusion to their story. As an artist herself Rory dreamed
of owning a gallery where she could display the works of unknown artists. She
created textile art – a combination of sculpture and painting done with bits of
fabric carefully layered to create a sense of movement and depth – a skill our Bookers’
hostess was very familiar with. Was karma involved in selecting this novel and
meeting at her home? Ten days before the opening of Rory’s gallery one of the
vendors pulled out leaving a blank wall and Rory’s own creations were finally
out of the storeroom and in a place they deserved. When time came to open the
doors, “Blackbird,” a song written by Paul McCartney played in the background,
the lyrics originally symbolizing the struggle of Black women in the South, but
the author’s use of this spoke to Camilla, Soline, and Rory, their pasts, their
presents, and their futures. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night;
take those broken wings and learn to fly; all your life you were only waiting
for this moment to arise.” Mother Camilla was a complicated “mess”
stating it was her job to shape Rory – to keep her from making the same
mistakes she did. We learn the Lowell’s were not known for stellar marriages
but looked good on the society pages and that Camilla had known since she was
ten she was adopted; her mother gave her up because she was pregnant and unmarried;
her father told her that her mother had lost three babies and was ashamed of
being childless so he arranged for the adoption and Camilla “was the
consolation prize.” No wonder she was a “mess.”
We spoke
of what defined a signature Roussel wedding dress and what three things were
required for a bride to qualify to wear one as the creators looked for a sign
that the betrothed couple’s echoes matched – each one half of a perfect whole
seeking the other half. The significance of the contents of Soline’s gray
cardboard box that miraculously survived the fire was in essence the foundation
for a reunion of family – a family at the time, unknown to any of the
characters. Soline and Rory’s stories mirrored each other – their bond, heartache
which developed into trust and friendship, their passion for creativity, their
lost loves, and their penchant for withdrawing from the world. The love story
between Soline and Anson was fairy-tale-like, except for being set amid the Nazi
occupation of France – their separation was fraught with despair and loss, but
the long-awaiting reunion was emotional filling readers with the satisfaction
that even the direst situations can have a happy ending. Anson’s father, Owen,
was a complicated character with tinges of humanity and decency but perhaps his
addiction to alcohol drove many of his knee-jerk reactions as he sought to control
every aspect of everyone’s lives. The shock of seeing a man she thought was
dead sent Soline into a tailspin and although Anson had been poisoned against
her from reports from the private detective he hired to find her, their love somehow
survived with their own happy-ever-after ending, forty years in the making.
Rory had Hux back in her life and Camilla finally had the family she longed for.
Happy
Reading,
JoDee
