Spotlight: Reading the Sweet Oak

After losing first her husband, then her daughter, seventy-eight-year-old grandmother Ruby wants to teach her risk-averse granddaughter, Tulsa, that some leaps are worth taking, no matter how high the potential fall. Tulsa loves her grandmother dearly, but she has a business to run and no time for romance—not even the paperback version. But when Ruby ropes her into a book club, Tulsa can’t bring herself to disappoint the woman who raised her.

Together with Ruby’s best friend, Pearl, as well as family friends BJ and Jen, the women embark on an exploration of modern-day love guided by written tales of romance. What they discover is a beautiful story that examines the bonds of friendship and the highs and lows of love in all its forms. (Synopsis courtesy of BookSparks.)

Jan Stites has been a screenwriter, a screenwriting instructor, a waitress, a secretary, a middle school teacher in both inner-city and affluent schools, a scuba dive travel writer, a journalist, a transcriptionist for doctors and for documentary filmmakers, and a volunteer teacher in Kenya and the Yucatan. She considers the affirmative action plan she wrote for a maritime company to be perhaps her greatest work of fiction. Edgewise, set in a gritty Oakland setting, is Jan's debut novel. A romantic comedy set in the Ozarks, Reading the Sweet Oak is a different, much lighter book involving small towns, good friends, rivers, herons and love in many forms. Visit Jan at her website, Facebook, and Twitter.