The Casserole Dish by Amey Zeigler

From Goodreads:

One broken woman. One broken house. One broken neighborhood. And one casserole dish to fix them all. 

After a painful divorce that left her house rehabbing business in shreds, Lisa Bennigan seeks to rebuild her life with her three children. When she inherits a house with lots of sweat equity, she throws herself into the renovation to avoid her pain and loss. 

While she attempts to rehab the house, she discovers the neighborhood also needs a little TLC. Backbiting and gossip have torn their cul-de-sac apart. Lisa hopes she can establish harmony by baking love into slightly magic casserole dishes shared with her neighbors and maybe even save her own heart as well.

My Take: 

This book falls firmly into the women's fiction category, which is not my normal read either. I guess I'm branching out this summer! There is a romance thread, but the main focus of the story is Lisa's journey of healing after her divorce as well as that of the neighborhood. 

This cut-de-sac is more of a mess than the house that needs to be decluttered and fixed up. Everyone is dealing with their own issues and their coping mechanism is to judge and complain about everyone else. Of course, this only makes everything worse. Jackson encourages Lisa to over an olive branch to try and make things better. She decides to take one neighbor a meal and wait to see what happens. 

This was an enjoyable read. I felt extremely lucky that I'd never experienced this kind of neighborhood. It made me appreciate all the great relationships I've enjoyed over my lifetime.

I give The Casserole Dish a solid 4 Stars and a Clean Rating.

1-5 scale and what it means:

1: I couldn’t even finish it / just plain bad

2: I hope I didn’t pay for this / disappointing

3: I didn’t hate it, but it was still missing something / forgettable but inoffensive

3.5: On the line between good and ok / like, not love

4: Solid mind candy / worth reading

4.5: So very close to perfection! / must read

5: I could not put it down and I’m still thinking about it! / a true treasure

Movie Ratings in relation to my review:

Clean--Hallmark movies, some kissing, no nudity, no intimacy on or off "screen"

PG--Some innuendo but nothing kids don't hear every day, intimacy is all closed door

PG-13--some language (swear words not related to intimacy), more talk about intimacy, heavy petting, removal of clothing on screen, but intimacy is closed door.

PG-14—somewhere between PG-13 and R. Not erotica, but at least a paragraph of on-screen intimacy

R--swearing (F-bomb, on “screen” intimacy, sometimes feels like the whole story is about the intimacy and not the relationship or some other plot, but not always