Books

“Suzanne Strempek Shea has created a multifaceted, unflawed gem.” – Wally Lamb

“She’s what Amy Tan is to Chinese Americans, Isaac Bashevis Singer to the Jews, Jimmy Breslin to the Irish, Mario Puzo to Italians, Terry MacMillan to African-Americans.” – Margaret Carlin of the Rocky Mountain News

“I love this book!” – Katie Couric, interviewing Suzanne on NBC's Today

KIRKUS REVIEWS

(Shea) captures the spirit of an insular Polish-Catholic community and homes in on one unforgettable family…A sometimes rollicking, sometimes heartbreaking, effective quirky read. – Kirkus Reviews

© Copyright Kirkus Reviews.

NEW YORK NEWSDAY

By Ellen Feldman

“She has written a wry, beautifully rendered novel that is touching but never sentimental…She may just be the fiction find of the summer.”

© Copyright New York Newsday.

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

By Martha Woodall

Readers who were beguiled by Suzanne Strempek Shea’s first novel, the incandescent ‘Selling the Lite of Heaven,’ and wondered if her next book could match it, can relax. Her new work, ‘Hoopi Shoopi Donna,’ not only equals ‘Selling,’ but in many ways surpasses it.

© Copyright Philadelphia Inquire

USA TODAY

Rich with an unusual sweetness, the novel perfectly captures small-town Polish-American life.

© Copyright USA Today.

GLAMOUR

By Laura Mathews

Shea’s wry yet warm rendering of a community where strong mothers rule and meek daughters find creative ways to rebel is satisfying on many levels.

© Copyright Glamour.

WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

By Carolyn Banks

Selling the Lite of Heaven is an odd and assured first novel and a wonderful coming-of-age story. I can’t imagine a single reader who will be disappointed. This novel is a charmer, and so, no matter how ‘unremarkable’ she thinks herself, is the narrator.

© Copyright Washington Post Book World.

THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

By Amanda Heller

The author’s affection for what are clearly her own roots breaks like winter sun through the deadpan gloom, giving the story its undeniable offbeat charm.’ ‘

© Copyright The Boston Sunday Globe.

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

Shea returns for the third time to the small-town Massachusetts she captured so well in “Selling the Lite of Heaven” and “Hoopi Shoopi Donna” for this sentimental yet satisfying tale of dreams realized in peculiar ways. Whe she was 10, Lily Wilk pulled an art kit out of a grab bag and knew she has found her “true occupation.” Twenty nine years later, Lily is making her living as an artist, though not in the way she once imagined. Kept busy by myriad mundane tasks, she draws children’s caricatures at parties, paints signs for rest rooms and fire hydrants and occasionally exhibits her real art work at the post office and local festivals. Still, she remains certain that she is destined for greater things. One day opportunity knocks in the form of Mary Ziemba, owner of a supermarket chain and the richest woman in town, who commissions Lily to paint a portrait of her fmily, one that will depict each member “at whatever was the best point in their lives.” As the project unfolds, Lily – whose own immediate family, ex-husband and stepson have recently scattered across the globe – reflects more and more on the true nature of human relations. She lovingly renders Lily’s family and friends, among them a coupon-addicted uncle and his girlfriend whose hobby is writing to the survivors of famous dead people, with the same affectionate brushstrokes she employs to describe her protagonist’s beloved art. By the time it becomes clear to Lily that family is as much created as it is inherited, readers may well count themselves lucky to have gained vicarious admission to her colorful circle.

© Copyright Publisher’s Weekly.

BOSTON GLOBE

By Amanda Heller

Adding ”Lily of the Valley” to her two earlier books, Suzanne Strempek Shea (”Hoopi Shoopi Donna,” ”Selling the Lite of Heaven”) has surely become the unofficial official novelist of central Massachusetts. She has a distinctive voice – comic, bittersweet, a bit old-fashioned – and a distinctive sense of place, rooted in the church- and family-centered Polish neighborhoods of the shabby industrial towns west of Worcester and east of the Berkshires. Here her heroine is Lily Wilk, an artist whose practical bent and absence of ambition have left her only vaguely dissatisfied with the life of sign painting and pet portraits to which she has resigned herself. Mourning the breakup of her marriage and her parents’ defection to Florida, Lily is feeling blue, until she receives a surprising commission from a rich old woman, the self-made supermarket queen of the Connecticut Valley, who wants her to paint a family portrait from a collection of photographs. Missing her own family terribly, Lily fails to note the implications of this odd request. Although the route is unexpected, Lily does manage to produce a painting that is the talk of the town, while also recalling what we’re supposed to do when life hands us lemons. In her novels the author has quietly created a quirky American version of English village fiction, wry and closely observed. Though her heroines’ horizons may be narrow, their sorrows and triumphs are no less affecting for being confined to the most prosaic of hopes and the most prosaic of places.

© Copyright Boston Globe.

KIRKUS

The story of a small-town Massachusetts girl with big-city ambitions, from the author of Hoopi Shoopi Donna (1996), etc. Most people have the tenor of their dreams pretty well established by the time they’re ten, and Lily Wilk is no exception. Someday, she vows, I will make something that people will stand in line for hours just to look at and study and be struck by. Then, satisfied beyond belief, they will travel all the way home in stunned silence, reflecting how they have been changed in some vital way by the sight of a thing made by my own right hand. Lilys obsession with creating a great work of art began almost by chance, when she picked a drawing set out of a grab-bag on her tenth birthday. From that day forward, Lily has drawn and painted everything she can get her hands on: tablecloths, fire hydrants, fingernails, storefront signs, dartboards, etc. Shes also done more conventional paintings and drawings, but her dreams of fame have remained largely dormant. Then, however, shes approached by a prosperous local businesswoman who asks her to paint a family portrait and she senses that this may be her chance. Mary Ziemba, Lilys patron, is the owner of a large chain of supermarkets who lives a deceptively simple life in spite of her great fortune. Instead of arranging a sitting, she provides Lily with photographs of the people she wants included in the painting, all of them her loved ones if not exactly her family in the strictest sense of the word. In the process of fitting together literally all the pieces of Mary’s life on a canvas, Lily begins to understand better the nature of her own feelings toward family and friends and eventually comes to a new understanding of herself. A bit mawkish but told with a freshness and real grace that make up for its sentimentality.

© Copyright Kirkus Associates.

BOOKLIST

By Joanne Wilkinson

Twenty-two years after the fateful summer she turned 18, Robyn Panek returns to her dying uncle’s farm to must close down the beloved Massachusetts homestead. Her memories of that time come flooding back, and she is immersed once again in the turmoil of adolescence and the stark confrontation between her and “crazy” Lucy Dragon, the girl she hoped would be the friend of her dreams, and Frankie, the boy she believed would be the love of her life. She decides to reopen the farm’s main attraction, the Happy Trails Pony Ring, for a final season and drums up some publicity for an auction. A newspaper article draws first Lucy and then Peter, who want to help, and the three finally confront the seminal event that has shaped their adult lives. Shea brings uncommon depth and richness to her narrative, which powerfully conveys both the adolescent push for independence and the adult need for connection.

© Copyright Booklist.

LIBRARY JOURNAL

By Ellen Cohen

2001

Readers will relate to the ordinary people in this “gentle mystery,” the author’s fourth book (following Lily of the Valley). Robyn Panek, who spends summers on her Aunt Victory and Uncle Pal’s Massachusetts farm, particularly enjoys leading young riders around the pony ring. However, during her 18th summer, something bizarre happened that was never properly explained or resolved. Now, many years later, Victory is no longer alive, Pal is terminally ill, and Robyn has been summoned to operate the pony ring one last season before closing the farm. The return of Lucy Dragon, a boarder who spent one summer on the farm before leaving under strange circumstances, appears to be a complication. However, Lucy has returned to make peace with the people she wronged that summer, and as a result Robyn is now able to face her past and gain some understanding of where her life is heading. A heartwarming story; recommended for all public libraries.

© Copyright Library Journal.

BOOKLIST

June 1, 2004

After turning to memoir, most recently in Shelf Life [BKL My 1/04], Shea, whose novels include Around Again (2001), returns to fiction in another delightfully enchanting tale about the unorthodox ways dreams can come true. Sophie and Gina leave Massachussetts for the tiny Irish village of Booley on a whim, and, just as whimsically, Gina returns home after just one day. Sophie stays, captivated by Booley’s charm and denizens, especially a woman who is no longer around. Finola O’Flynn, she of the shop that bears her name, skipped town without so much as a wave of her shillelah, breaking her lover’s heart and leaving scores of devoted villagers whose problems she solved in the lurch. As Sophie literally steps into Finola’s shoes, she begins living Finola’s life. So effortless is the tranformation, Sophie is unwilling to relinquish her new identity–and new boyfriend–when the real Finola suddenly reappears. Shea’s Sophie is a beguiling heroine, a plucky, lucky American minx who becomes the sort of Irish lass that would have made Maureen O’Hara proud.

© Copyright Booklist.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Shea forsakes her usual subject, Polish-Americans in Massachusetts (Around Again, 2001, etc.), to portray a single American woman taking on a new life in a small Irish village… An engaging tale, deftly crafted and plotted, with plenty of Irish whimsy, charm, and blarney.”

May 1, 2004

Narrator Sophie, single and 30-ish, comes to the westernmost spot in Ireland because her good friend and former co-worker Gina thinks a trip there will help both of them get over losing their jobs. But the day after they arrive in Booley for a three-month visit, Gina heads back to the US, declaring it’s not the place she needs but insisting that her friend remain. Soon Sophie is one of the locals. She gets a job in Liam’s craftshop, reorganizes the entire store, makes bracelets that are a big hit, and be-friends all the villagers. Liam is still recovering from his love affair with Finola O’ Flynn, whose name is on the storefront. Finola left Booley three years ago with a new love, and Liam has never been the same. Neither has most of Booley, Sophie soon learns: everyone she meets, from Noel the weaver to elderly retired farmer Joe, recalls the wonders Finola worked. Sophie soon finds herself taking on Finola’s identity as customers in the shop, mostly tourists, assume that must be her name. She had planned to move in with traveling salesman Charlie when she went home, but–in what she concedes is an amazing coincidence–Charlie’s hitherto unacknowledged wife and two daughters stop by the shop on their way to London. Sophie’s broken heart is soon cured by Liam, and she begins to plan on settling in Booley for good after a quick trip home. But then Finola suddenly returns the day before Sophie must leave. Stateside, Sophie tries to forget, but a promise to old Joe brings her back to the village, where Finola has some revelations of her own. An engaging tale, deftly crafted and plotted, with plenty of Irish whimsy, charm, and blarney.

© Copyright Kirkus Reviews.

IRISH VOICE

By Sean O’Driscoll

September 1, 2004

In this latest novel by the New England Book Award winner for 2000, Sophie White arrives in the Irish seaside village of Booley after losing her job in the States. She takes a job at the local craft store, a job once held by the mysterious Finola O’Flynn, who has left the village. sophie also moves into Finola’s house, starts wearing Finola’s clothes, dates her ex-boyfriend and sells healing bracelets she claims are made by Finola. However, Finola returns to Booley to reclaim her life, throwing up huge complications for Sophie. Definitely chick lit, but I found it well written and funny with accurate Irish dialogue. Would make great travel reading.

© Copyright Irish Voice.

DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE

Steve Pfarrer

Jan. 29, 2015

For her first novel in several years, Valley writer Suzanne Strempek Shea has been inspired in part by the former “Dead Mall” of Hadley, the Mountain Farms Mall on Route 9 that was largely vacant for many years before being reconfigured with freestanding stores like Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and Old Navy.

Shea has fun gently tweaking the legacy of the old Mountain Farms Mall (or old, underleased malls everywhere). Some of the businesses sharing underused footage with Rosie are the “Affordable Attorney” and “The Village Barber”: the Orchard Mall has been designed to simulate a traditional New England town, where three large walkways merge to form a “Town Common” consisting of “a gazebo, dry cement pond, flagless pole and much square yardage of once-emerald AstroTurf.”

In notes accompanying her novel, Shea says the book and its title were inspired by a visit she made years ago to a palm reader in New York City; the woman used that exact phrase with her. “I don’t know what else she told me,” Shea writes. “She could have given me that night’s winning lottery number, but all that stuck with me was her question.”

Listen to Strempek Shea’s interview with New England Public Radio’s Karen Brown here

“This is one of those books that changes your life forever. I am deeply grateful thatI got a chance to read it, and I will recommend it to everyone I know.” – Anita Shreve

LIBRARY JOURNAL

By Bette-Lee Fox

April 1, 2002

Successful novelist Shea (Hoopi Shoopi Donna, LJ 4/15/96) was 41 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000. Here, she offers an eloquent evocation of the breast cancer experience and mindset. Her surgery went well, with no lymph node involvement, so she faced radiation therapy. As Shea acknowledges, she isn’t a good patient, but her description of the mechanics as well as the “psychology” of radiation, presented in diary-like chapter, will inform and help others going through the ordeal. And an ordeal it is, over six weeks, five days a week, enduring the fatigue and the skin irritation, only to be told by one well-intentioned acquaintance, “But it’s not like you had chemotherapy. Now that would be something to complain about.” Jamie Bernard’s Breast Cancer, There & Back (LJ 9/1/01) provides more detail of the process of radiation therapy, but Shea’s prose captures the reader and makes you root for her with all your heart. “If I have to have cancer, have it tip my life over as it has, I want some kind of prize at the end,” she says. We are the prize winners, with this glorious book as our reward. Highly recommended.

© Copyright Library Journal.

CURE MAGAZINE

By Kathy Latour

2002

So How would an award-winning fiction writer tell her breast cancer story? To find out, pick up a copy of Suzanne Strempek Shea’s book. Good writing is good writing, no matter the topic, and for those of us in the cancer community, Shea’s exploration of radiation and the experiences and people she met are better than any fiction – and as most of us know, a lot stranger and more intense. I like this book for the intensity just as much as I like Wendy Burton’s for its whimsy.

© Copyright Cure magazine.

BOOKLIST

May 1, 2004

“Novelist Shea turned memoirist in Songs from a Lead-Lined Room, a chronicle of her bout with breast cancer. She now continues her upbeat recovery saga with a smart and jocund contribution to the ever-popular “year of” genre by telling the tale of her first year working in an independent bookstore. Realizing that although she was healing physically, she needed a reason to leave the house, Shea jumped at the chance to work at Edwards Books in Springfield, Massachusetts. She launches her piquant and irresistible narrative with a hilarious riff on the questions bookstore clients ask, which is followed by revealing glimpses into her experiences as a touring author and a supple overview of the state of the book worked in general and endangered independent bookstores in particular. With her sparkling humor, reporter’s eye for detail, raconteur’s love of anecdote, literary passion, and affection for humankind, Shea fashions a fresh and rousing tribute to the grand and quirky tradition of bringing books and readers together, with insight, finesse, and enthusiasm.”

© Copyright Booklist.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

April 25, 2004

“I am now an author working in a bookstore,” writes Shea of her three years working at Edwards Books in Springfield, Mass. “I am a spy from another land.” A reader must decide for himself, but in the end, the frantic life of readings and author tours and explanations seems less appealing than life in this quiet family-run store, where the clerks double as psychotherapists and the friendships made are just as real as the sacred object itself. (Shea notices that people tend to carry books close to their chests, like babies.) In a country of 25,000 bookstores, Shea counts maybe 300 “truly outstanding stores.” “Shelf Life” has much the same feel as a browse through a bookstore; the digressions, the snippets of conversation, the lure of new titles and the possibility of something that could change a life.

© Copyright Los Angeles Times.

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

To fill the time as she recovered from cancer and chemotherapy, Strempek Shea volunteered at a friend’s independent bookstore in Springfield, Mass. An accomplished novelist (Around Again; Lily of the Valley), Strempek Shea felt at first like a spy-“a farmer hanging around the dairy section”-as she observed customers in constant discovery of books. Despite the bleak reason for her new job, she embraced it with delight and here recounts her sojourn at Edwards Books with humor and passion.Not a great deal happens though, even during the coverage of 9/11. She looks at the small, independent bookstore, and how it stays in business. Although she can’t help making fun of the inane questions she’s sometimes asked (“What would you recommend for a flight to California? I’ll be sleeping most of the time”), she lovingly portrays devoted book folks, such as “the tiny older woman who arrives on her payday to buy two or three more mysteries. The young woman who received the call that the latest of the Gothic novels her mother collects have arrived.” The author also shares droll, albeit tacitly self-promoting, insights on the tour for her latest book (“there are maybe forty people at my reading, and I even know two of them!”). As readers absorb the life of the bookstore and author, many will be tempted to look for the titles she drops throughout the work. Book enthusiasts who pine for a friendly, like-minded community will love this light, funny memoir.

© Copyright Publisher’s Weekly.

TIMES-PICAYUNE (NEW ORLEANS, LA)

SELLER’S MARKET

May 16, 2004

If you’ve ever fantasized about working in a bookstore, ‘Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama, and Other Page-turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore,’ by Suzanne Strempek Shea (Beacon, $20), is the book for you. Shea, who is recovering from breast cancer, is having trouble getting a new book under way, so when a friend calls and asks her for help in finding a new bookstore employee, Shea offers herself as a job candidate.The author of five novels, Shea begins to experience literary life from the other side of the counter. She describes the struggles of her store, a family bookstore called Edwards Books in Springfield, Mass.; the changing seasons; the eccentric and wonderful staff. She learns about never judging customers, about instant books (in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks), about how to pack cards properly. Readers will wonder if the airline pilot, a customer in search of a book about rekindling love, was successful; will laugh at the false teeth in a bag behind the counter, awaiting return to their proper owner; will rejoice in Shea’s return to life and health and energy.

“Get thee to a bookstore,” is her mantra, and it is a good one. “You never know what you’ll find in there,” she writes. “Maybe a copy, as well as the feeling, of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’ Or as one shopper called that book, ‘Lightheadedness.’ ”

You will want to rush out to a bookstore when you finish “Shelf Life.” But you may not be in search of a book; you may want a job instead.

© Copyright Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA).

BOOKLIST

By June Sawyers

Cradle Catholic Shea was told that Protestants were going to hell, and so were she and her friends should they ever step inside a Protestant church. She felt no urge to visit such churches until after a personal health scare and the death of John Paul II, when the passion of the mourners on her streets and TV impressed her. She had drifted away from the church but, fascinated by and a little jealous of the mourners’ intensity, began wondering about what lay beyond other churches’ doors. Her curiosity eventuated in this book. For one year she attended different non-Catholic services across the country—Methodist, Shaker, Quaker, Seventh-Day Adventist, interfaith, Mormon—in buildings ranging from unadorned chapels to huge megachurches. She wanted to learn what makes the denominations differ, and different from the Catholicism she was raised in. She visited Baptist churches in New York and South Carolina, a “cowboy” church in Colorado, a Quaker meetinghouse in Philadelphia, a Greek Orthodox church in Rhode Island, an evangelical church in New Hampshire, an Episcopal church in Hawaii. She stopped in at Barack Obama’s place of worship, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, as well as 320-year-old King’s Chapel in Boston. It was for her and is for readers a captivating trip into the heart of non-Catholic Christian America that reveals the amazing diversity of one complex faith.

© Copyright Booklist.

"We hear about the triumph of human spirit quite a lot. But Mags Riordan personifies the idea. In This Is Paradise, Shea takes on her extraordinary journey and shows us the power of a mother's love." - Ann Hood, author of Comfort, a Journey Through Grief

THE BOSTON GLOBE

Read Kate Tuttle’s piece on Suzanne and “This Is Paradise” here.

Bill Newman interviews Suzanne on WHMP radio’s “The Bill Newman Show. Listen here

Read The Kerryman Newspaper’s article on This is Paradise here

Read a feature about “140 Years of Providential Caring” here

The Reminder article on Soap Operas Confidential here