Looking for Me by Beth Hoffman

Sometimes you just want to read a nice book. You know what kind of book I mean. One that's easy to read and populated with easy to love characters and full of interesting details about the furniture refinishing business and infused with so much warmth and love and generally good feelings about people even if life is hard and it hurts.

I am not always in the mood for this sort of book, but today I was and I read Beth Hoffman's Looking for Me and I just loved it. I breezed through it relatively quickly and I just enjoyed it so much.

Looking for Me is about Teddi. Teddi sells antiques and refinishes and repairs furniture for a living. But she didn't start out there and this novel tells us how she came to do that as well as giving us some stories about her past and where she came from. It's about a brother and sister relationship, but also about a mother and daughter (in fact, I really thought from the beginning it was going to be more mother/daughter but it kind of takes in a bunch of stuff) Admittedly, there were times when I had no idea where it was going but that didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book.

There's even a little bit of a mystery at the heart of a book, the kind that will make your heart ache and while it's given some resolution, I don't think it's the kind of resolution that I would personally want. But it makes sense. And there are all these little moments of wisdom, and there's all this glorious beautiful friendship.

One quibble! Teddi was shaping up to be one of those characters that could maybe stay single and still be happy, but a relationship arrives in the picture. I didn't need it to imagine a happy ending for Teddi.

Great enjoyable read!

Rating: 4.5/5
Source of Book: Review copy received from publisher
Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books/viking (penguin)