Note from Nicole: Saturday night is here! It’s one of my favorite features, and I love hearing about author’s recommendations. Join me today and check out author Kathleen Basi’s 3 things for this Saturday.
What is your Saturday night reading suggestion?
These days, I’m usually in the mood for a feel-good escape from reality! For this, I’m going to recommend Louise Miller’s two charming books, The City Baker’s Guide To Country Living and The Late Bloomers’ Club. I love her characters—the protagonists are relatable and eminently rootable and the cast of quirky, lovable side characters makes you just want to move to these small towns. You can just lose yourself in these lovely stories!
What is your Saturday night movie suggestion?
Following the theme of feel-good escapism, I’m going with Return To Me. Minnie Driver and David Duchovny are adorable in the central roles, and I love the straightforward, sweet simplicity of their story. But there’s so much more to love in this movie. The marriage between Bonnie Hunt (who’s also the director!) and Jim Belushi is hysterical. The friendship between the two women is what we all aspire to. But I think the thing that elevates this from a sweet rom-com to a classic is the Irish Italian restaurant and its zany cast of old men and women playing cards and arguing over pop culture phenoms from the 40s and 50s. They’re hysterically funny, and when David Duchovny and Minnie Driver enter the mix, it’s just like a warm hug for the heart. My husband and I never get tired of watching this movie!
What is your Saturday night wild card suggestion?
My degrees are not in writing at all, but in music. Early in the pandemic shutdown I stumbled across this staged version of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Do yourself a favor—put it up on your TV and experience a gem of classical music in a way you have never imagined! It’s so much more than a concert.
About A Song for the Road
It’s one year after the death of her husband and twin teenagers, and Miriam Tedesco has lost faith in humanity and herself. When a bouquet of flowers that her husband always sends on their anniversary shows up at her workplace, she completely unravels. With the help of her best friend, she realizes that it’s time to pick up the pieces and begin to move on. Step one is not even cleaning out her family’s possessions, but just taking inventory starting with her daughter’s room. But when she opens her daughter’s computer, she stumbles across a program her daughter has created detailing an automated cross-country road trip, for her and her husband to take as soon-to-be empty nesters.
Seeing and hearing the video clips of her kids embedded in the program, Miriam is determined to take this trip for her children. Armed with her husband’s guitar, her daughter’s cello, and her son’s unfinished piano sonata, she embarks on a musical pilgrimage to grieve the family she fears she never loved enough. Along the way she meets a young, pregnant hitchhiker named Dicey, whose boisterous and spunky attitude reminds Miriam of her own daughter.
Tornadoes, impromptu concerts, and an unlikely friendship…whether she’s prepared for it or not, Miriam’s world is coming back to life. But as she struggles to keep her focus on the reason she set out on this journey, she has to confront the possibility that the best way to honor her family may be to accept the truths she never wanted to face.
Hopeful, honest, and tender, A Song for the Road is about courage, vulnerability, and forgiveness, even of yourself, when it really matters.
Pre-order A Song for the Road on Amazon.com or add it to your Goodreads reading list.
About the author
Kathleen M. Basi spent her childhood drawing inspiration for stories from the fields and trees on her family’s farm…when she wasn’t climbing on tractors and jumping off hay bales. Now, as a mother to three rambunctious boys (read that: always breaking something!) and one chromosomally gifted daughter (Down syndrome: more alike than different!), she doesn’t have to look any farther than her kitchen table. Her novel, A Song for the Road, debuts May 11, 2021.
I like that Copland take.
Isn’t it great! I wish my school had done something like this when I was in orchestra.