Title: Hearts on a String
Author: Kris Radish
Publisher: Bantam
Publication Date: May 25, 2010
Paperback: 336 pages
ISBN: 978-0553384758
Genre: Fiction

From the Publisher:

Bestselling author Kris Radish delves deeply into the emotions of five very different women who are thrown together by chance—only to discover that they have more in common than they ever could have imagined.

Holly Blandeen has always cherished the story her grandmother told her about the thread that connects all women, tying them forever in sisterhood. It’s a beautiful idea, but with all the curveballs life has thrown her way, Holly has often felt isolated, different from other women. That starts to change when she meets four strangers in an airport and they agree to share a luxury hotel suite because a powerful spring storm is barreling across the country, stranding travelers from California to Florida. What begins as a spur-of-the-moment decision becomes an unlikely, unexpected, and sometimes reluctant exercise in female bonding, as these five exceptional women—each at a crossroads—swap stories, share secrets, and seek answers to the questions they’ve been asking about life, love, and the path to true happiness. A storm may have grounded them for the moment, but after this wild adventure in which anything can and does happen, they’ll never have to fly solo again.

My Review:

An endearing novel showing how women are inter-connected, Hearts on a String by Kris Radish begins with a woman explaining to her young great-granddaughter that a string connects all women, some women instinctively know and others eventually find this out.  Flash forward almost thirty years to a bathroom, across from a bar in the Tampa International Airport, where investment banker Nan Telvid drops her iPhone into the toilet and soon four women, Patti, Cathy, Margo, and Holly come to her aid.  While these five strangers are deciding a way to retrieve the telephone, it is announced that the airport will be shutting down due to weather.  These five strangers decide to make the best of a bad situation by sharing a suite in the luxurious Rivera.

While the reasoning behind how these women end up sharing a suite may appear implausible, it serves a greater purpose.  Radish writes a beautiful novel full of emotions that come from five different women in different stages of their lives and from different parts of the United States coming together under stressful circumstances.  It took about 45 pages to really grab my interest as everything appeared so implausible, but then I became curious as to what would happen to these women next and without warning I was nearing the end of a beautiful, heart-warming, endearing and at times painful novel of five women coming into their own and learning from each other.  Each woman is described in detail throughout the novel rather than one at a time, working well with the message Radish offers her readers and by the end of the four days, it feels as thought the reader is connected to these women.   Let me state upfront, had I not been asked to review this book I would have not read past the initial bathroom scene and I would have missed out on a wonderful novel.   If I could change anything about the novel, it would be the ending, and not how the novel ends, as that is brilliant, but rather the formatting; it is simply a personal preference of mine.

Hearts on a String is a remarkable novel of friendship, trust, blind faith, and what it means to be a woman.  I noted some poor reviews and wonder if people gave up in the beginning for the reason I stated above.  Please do not give up, rather keep reading, it is very much worth getting to know these five women and the gifts they offer to each other.  I would recommend Hearts on a String as a wonderful summer read and would be interested to hear of any book groups who have discussed this book. I think the characters would agree this is a book to be shared.

About the Author:

Kris Radish is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of Searching for Paradise in Parker, PA, The Sunday List of Dreams, Annie Freeman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral, Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn, The Elegant Gathering of White Snows, The Shortest Distance Between Two Women, and Hearts on a String. She lives in Florida, where she is at work on her next novel, which Bantam will publish.

Additional information about the author:

Kris’s website.
Kris’s blog.
Follow Kris on Twitter.
Kris’ Facebook Page.

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I received a complimentary copy of Hearts on a String by Kris Radish from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.