Leelee Satterfield seemed to have it all: a gorgeous husband, two adorable daughters, and roots in the sunny city of Memphis, Tennessee. So when her husband gets the idea to uproot the family to run a quaint Vermont inn, Leelee is devastated…and her three best friends are outraged.

But she’s loved Baker Satterfield since the tenth grade, how can she not indulge his dream? Plus, the glossy photos of bright autumn trees and smiling children in ski suits push her over the edge…after all, how much trouble can it really be?

But Leelee discovers pretty fast that there’s a truckload of things nobody tells you about Vermont until you live there: such as mud season, vampire flies, and the danger of ice sheets careening off roofs. Not to mention when her beloved Yorkie decides to pick New Year’s Eve to go to doggie heaven-she encounters one more New England oddity: frozen ground means you can’t bury your dead in the winter. And that Yankee idiosyncrasy just won’t do.

The inn they’ve bought also has its host of problems: an odor that no amount of potpourri can erase, tacky décor, and a staff of peculiar Vermonters whose personalities are as unique as the hippopotamus collection gracing the fireplace mantle. The whole operation is managed by Helga, a stern German woman who takes special delight in bullying Leelee for her southern gentility. Needless to say, it doesn’t take long for Leelee to start wondering when to drag out the moving boxes again.

But when an unexpected hardship takes Leelee by surprise, she finds herself left alone with an inn to run, a mortgage to pay, and two daughters to raise. But this Southern belle won’t be run out of town so easily. Drawing on the Southern grit and inner strength she didn’t know she had, Leelee decides to turn around the Inn, her attitude and her life. In doing so, she makes friends with her neighbors, finds a little romance, and realizes there’s a lot more in common with Vermont than she first thought.

There are some fun characters in this book and I enjoyed parts of it, but it was a little too stereotypical for me.

Leelee is from Tennessee so, of course, she thinks only the best people come from the South, but in this book everyone she meets in the north is some type of redneck (or woodchuck, as she calls them). Either that or they’re snobs. Apparently there aren’t any middle-class, regular folks who don’t have exaggerated physical features. The one “normal” person is, of course, a huge flirt and hated by Leelee. Only her southern friends have any sort of charm AND style (northerners can’t have both).

Despite the stereotypes, I didn’t mind the book until the end (though Southern fiction is a little slower than I normally prefer to read). It was fun to watch Leelee grow as a person, but at the end (in my opinion) she turned out to be as bad as her husband.

**SPOILER**
When Leelee has the chance to leave Vermont, she really doesn’t hesitate. Even when she knows that her friends are going to end up working for the terrible original owners of the inn, she doesn’t change her mind — she doesn’t care that her friends are going to end up hating their jobs again or that she’s walking away from people who like her as she is. Instead, she does what her ex-husband did and thinks only about herself and her wants and leaves them to fend for themselves. I lost respect for her then (the excuse she uses about her daughters only being able to sit inside and watch TV all winter is bunk; I kind of wonder if the author talked with anyone raised in northern winters).
**END SPOILER**

I actually enjoyed the supporting characters more than I enjoyed Leelee — she came across as a bit of a whiny snob. If it hadn’t been for everyone else in the story, I might have put it down.

Rated PG-13 for some swearing and drinking. Get your copy here!