If you’re looking for lighthearted, yet meaningful stories, these three authors have got you covered. Their characters face the same issues in romance, career, and family that many women in the real world do. Funny and smart, sweet and powerful, these authors craft likeable protagonists, add some hijinks and a dash of love, and give you great stories to fall into.

As always, you can support the Fox Cities Book Festival, indie bookstores, and these fabulous authors by purchasing the titles from our BookShop.org affiliate bookstore.

Sonali Dev

USA Today Bestselling author Sonali Dev writes Bollywood-style love stories that let her explore issues faced by women around the world while still indulging her faith in a happily ever after. Dev’s novels have been on Library Journal, NPR, Washington Post, and Kirkus’s Best Books of the year lists. She has won the American Library Association’s award for best romance and  the RT Reviewer Choice Award for best contemporary romance. Shelf Awareness calls her “Not only one of the best but one of the bravest romance novelists working today.”
Her most recent book, Recipe for Persuasion, follows Chef Ashna Raje who is desperately trying to save her beloved restaurant while proving to her mother she isn’t a complete screw up. When Ashna is asked to join the popular Cooking with the Stars reality show, it seems like everything will finally come together–until she’s paired with the soccer star celebrity who was her first love until he ghosted her.

Join Sonali Dev for a discussion about her Bollywood-style love stories in “A Conversation with Sonali Dev” on Tuesday, October 13, 2020 at 6:30 PM.

 

Roselle Lim

Roselle Lim was born in the Philippines and immigrated to Canada as a child. She lived in north Scarborough in a diverse, Asian neighbourhood. She found her love of writing by listening to her lola (paternal grandmother’s) stories about Filipino folktales. Growing up in a household where Chinese superstition mingled with Filipino Catholicism, she devoured books about mythology, which shaped the fantasies in her novels. An artist by nature, she considers writing as “painting with words.”

Just out, Lim’s latest novel, Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop is a delightful novel about exploring the magical possibilities of life in the most extraordinary city of all: Paris. Vanessa can see the future at the bottom of teacups and avoiding her own clairvoyance is nearly all Vanessa can handle until her parents hire a matchmaking expert from Shanghai. Then, after her first matchmaking appointment, Vanessa sees death and knows she has to go with her Aunt Evelyn to Paris to discover more about her gifts.

Learn from Lim at “Writers and Bullet Journals: How to Get Started and How to Plan Your Novel” on Friday, October 16, 2020 at 3 PM as well as at the “Women in Writing Panel” on Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 8 PM.

Amy E. Reichert

Amy E. Reichert, author of The Coincidence of Coconut Cake, The Optimist’s Guide to Letting Go, the forthcoming The Kindred Supper Club, and more, loves to write stories that end well with characters you’d invite to dinner. A wife, mom, amateur chef, lifelong Cheesehead, a volunteer baby snuggler, and cider enthusiast, she earned her MA in English Literature and serves on her library’s board of directors. She’s a member of Tall Poppy Writers.

In The Optimist’s Guide to Letting Go, Gina wants to make it through one day without her mother, Lorraine, cataloguing all her faults, and her teenage daughter, May, snubbing her. Her relentlessly sunny disposition annoys both her mother and her daughter, no matter how hard she tries. But when Lorraine suffers a sudden stroke, Gina stumbles upon a family secret Lorraine’s kept hidden for forty years. In the face of her mother’s failing health and her daughter’s rebellion, this optimist might find that piecing together the truth is the push she needs to let go. . . .

Find Reichert at the “Panel: Where Ideas Come From–And How We Turn them into Books!” on Tuesday, October 13, 2020 at 9:30.