by Martha Woodroof

From debut novelist Martha Woodroof comes an inspiring tale of a small-town college professor, a remarkable new woman at the bookshop, and the ten-year old son he never knew he had.Tom Putnam has resigned himself to a quiet and half-fulfilled life. An English professor in a sleepy college town, he spends his days browsing the Shakespeare shelves at the campus bookstore, managing the oddball faculty in his department and caring, alongside his formidable mother-in-law, for his wife Marjory, a fragile shut-in with unrelenting neuroses, a condition exacerbated by her discovery of Tom’s brief and misguided affair with a visiting poetess a decade earlier.
Then, one evening at the bookstore, Tom and Marjory meet Rose Callahan, the shop's charming new hire, and Marjory invites Rose to their home for dinner, out of the blue, her first social interaction since her breakdown. Tom wonders if it’s a sign that change is on the horizon, a feeling confirmed upon his return home, where he opens a letter from his former paramour, informing him he'd fathered a son who is heading Tom's way on a train.  His mind races at the possibility of having a family after so many years of loneliness. And it becomes clear change is coming whether Tom’s ready or not.A heartwarming story with a charmingly imperfect cast of characters to cheer for, Small Blessings's wonderfully optimistic heart that reminds us that sometimes, when it feels like life has veered irrevocably off track, the track shifts in ways we never can have imagined.

Overall,I liked this book, but it was divided into two sections, and my feelings about the book were divided along with them. I thought part one (about a third of the book) was a bit slow moving. The writing was very well done, and the characters well developed, but something was just a bit ho-hum for me. The second part of the book picked up considerably. Once we got into the story of Henry, and all the other people of the town, I was hooked. This book does have a rather predictable ending, but the way it gets to that end is all sorts of happy reading! At the end of the book, I found myself wanting to get a followup to find out how all of the characters were doing 🙂 It was an excellent character study of some ordinary people, all of whom had some sadness in their life that they were working through.

I got the chance to hear Martha promote this book at my local bookstore. While she has written many articles for many publications over the years (NPR, NY Times, Washington Post), this is her first novel. The publishing of this book is a dream come true for her, and she spoke about never giving up on a life goal!

This is well worth a read, especially after the first 100 pages.