Fall In Love with Honey Creek
By M. CLARE HAEFNER | Cover courtesy of the book publisher
As an avid reader, I sometimes struggle to decide which book or books to review in Tex Appeal. But when I started reading Jodi Thomas’s recent novel Sunday at the Sunflower Inn (Zebra, April 2022) over the holidays, I knew I had the perfect pick for this issue — the story begins on Valentine’s Day.
It’s also set in Honey Creek, Texas, a fictional town that if real, would be nestled in the heart of Central Texas somewhere between Fort Hood, Waco and Bryan.
The fourth book in Thomas’s Honey Creek series, Sunday at the Sunflower Inn is a delightful, easy read with just the right amount of romance and mystery. Like many of her other novels, Thomas deftly weaves chapters together with multiple narrators, skipping back and forth through the same timeline to share each person’s perspective until the storyline merges and all is revealed.
In Sunday at the Sunflower Inn, the story centers on Honey Creek Cafe owner Jessica Ann McKenzie — affectionately known as “Jam” — who has fulfilled her dream of owning a restaurant but wonders if, at age 32, she may have to give up on her dream of finding her forever love, at least until Sgt. Tuscon Smith crawls out of the muddy river and into her life. Valentine’s Day also finds a regular patron of the Honey Creek Cafe — 67-year-old confirmed bachelor Mr. Charles Winston — pondering whether it might finally be time to take a chance on love with Miss Lilly Lambert, a longtime friend who lives alone above the pharmacy where she worked for 43 years. Finding love and belonging isn’t just about romantic relationships. For McCoy Mason, it’s about connecting with a grandfather he never knew as he recovers from a car accident and learning more about his family’s ties to the old stagecoach stop.
Not solely focused on romance, Sunday at the Sunflower Inn also involves mystery as photos of what appears to be a dead soldier land on Sheriff Pecos Smith’s desk during his first week on the job. The puzzling part is that there’s no sign of a body or a struggle along the dock where the photos were taken.
One of my favorite things about her stories is that they’re snapshots — you follow the characters’ lives for a few days or weeks, following what’s happening in their lives for a moment in time, then the story ends and their lives go on.
Her delightful and nostalgic writing style is why Jodi Thomas is a queen of romance, often on best-seller lists. The native Texan has penned more than 30 books in historical and contemporary settings. The Honey Creek series blends past and present — as her fictional small town in the Brazos Valley is populated with people whose families have owned land and homes for generations.
While easily a stand-alone novel, Sunday at the Sunflower Inn is more enjoyable if you’ve read the previous books, as minor characters from Breakfast at the Honey Creek Cafe, Picnic in Someday Valley and Dinner on Primrose Hill finally get a chance to shine. Reading the series is like spending time with family or catching up with old friends — even if it’s been awhile, you still fit right in. Pick up a copy and fall in love with Honey Creek. And look for Strawberry Lane in April, which starts Thomas’s next series in her fictional Brazos Valley towns.
