Esther Larson has been helping cook for the funerals of the people in the community for years. Now, a former resident, Annabelle Welsh, has died, and her husband and children are coming to the Northwoods of Wisconsin to bury her. Her husband is a famous Food Channel chef, Ivan Welsh. Ivan's son, Connor is Annabelle's stepson, who is suffering from PTSD due to assisting at a bad car crash while a paramedic. Cricket, Annabelle's daughter is smart but grieving. Ivan had been having an affair, so Connor felt he needed to care for Cricket. They stay at Esther's granddaughter, Iris's, cabin. Iris and Connor fall in love, but issues due to his PTSD. Also, Esther was scammed out of $30k, and the community must help raise money. How? Sell cookbooks!
Sweet story, but with quite a bit of sadness. ( )

Esther Larson is embarrassed when her family discovers that she has been fooled by an online scammer with a sob story to whom she’s given almost her entire savings and that now the bank is threatening to foreclose on her lakeside home. Esther’s granddaughter, Iris, is horrified by the possibility of her grandmother’s loss, and is determined to stop it happening. Inspiration comes from an unlikely source, the son of celebrity chef Ivan Welsh, who is staying in Iris’s Air B&B with his father and younger sister. Well known for her tasty cooking as a member of the ‘funeral ladies’, a group of women who have been providing food for funerals for decades, Iris thinks a cookbook containing recipes from Esther and her friends would sell well enough to raise the money needed.

I took a chance on The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County expecting a lighthearted family drama, with recipes included as a bonus, but that’s not quite the story Claire Swinarski has written. I would have been content if the story had remained focused on Esther, her friends, and the cookbook, but instead Iris, and the troubled Cooper Welsh, take centre stage. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just not what I was looking for.

If I look past that disappointment, The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County was an engaging read. There is warmth, gentle humour, and heart as Esther’s family, friends and community rallies around her, but Swinarski also stirs up a lot of emotion exploring challenging topics including PTSD, grief, intimate violence, and family dysfunction. I admired the realistic and sensitive way the author had her characters deal with these issues, and I particularly found the connection between Esther’s marriage, and Iris and Conner’s relationship to be a poignant element. However in what is a reasonably short book at under 300 pages, Connor’s, and his family’s, issues certainly felt as if they dominated the storyline.

Just as a note disappointingly my ARC included only a single recipe for pie crust, I certainly hope that the published copy contains more.

Despite my thwarted expectations, I did like The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County, and if you favour lots of family drama in a small town setting I’m sure you will too. ( )

This book was not what I was expecting by reading the synopsis. I expected a relatively light read with much good gossip between the funeral ladies. What I did get was a book that was mostly about PTSD, a romance, a lot of death,(and not just of the counties people) and an elderly woman who gets scammed for about $30,000 and what she is going to do to save her house. Religion plays a rather large part in this novel, but not to the point where the book is only about religion.

It was an interesting read, but it was not light and would not be recommended as a beach read.

*ARC was supplied by the publisher Avon and Harper Voyager, the author, and NetGalley. ( )