Reeling

A Novel

What stage of grief is it when your grandmother's ghost keeps popping up on your electronic devices? Denial? For RayAnne that seems to be the stage for launching the second season of Fishing!—in New Zealand. Ready or not, she is taking public television's first all-women fishing talk show on the road, putting the cold Minnesota winter in the rearview mirror—which, it turns out, Gran is haunting, too.

RayAnne and her indefatigable producer Cassi set out across New Zealand in search of noteworthy women who fish, including a skipjack boat captain navigating sexist harbors;a writer of historical suffragette fiction (which is, apparently, a thing); and a reclusive Maori octogenarian who ties fishing flies for dignitaries. Their stories, and a good dose of the country's history, are almost enough to take the edge off RayAnne's homesickness and grief, to say nothing of jetlag. Meanwhile, the romantic and family entanglements she left behind at home haven't exactly come untangled in her absence.

You'll come to love Rayanne, our accidental talk-show host, in this tale with a lighthearted surface and surprising depths.

©2021 Sarah Stonich (P)2023 Tantor