The Wishing Bridge by Viola Shipman (TLC Book Tours)

 

Do you have any towns or areas you visit for the Christmas season?

Frankenmuth, Michigan is a beautiful town known as Michigan’s “Little Bavaria” and takes celebrating Christmas seriously with a giant Christmas store, Bronner’s and a beautifully decorated town. I have only visited Frankenmuth once while I was in college, but I would love to visit again.  Frankenmuth is the setting of The Wishing Bridge by Viola Shipman.

Henrietta “Henri” Wegner grew up in Frankenmuth and her parents started Wegner’s, an iconic Christmas store that draws tourists from far and wide.  The business has had troubles making it through COVID and tough competition from Amazon.  Henri left Frankenmuth after graduating from the University of Michigan and works for a mergers and acquisitions company in Detroit.  Her boss sends her home for the holidays to make a big deal for a corporation to take over her family’s business.  Once home, she reconnects with her best friend, Sofie, and her childhood sweetheart, Shep.  She discovers that Shep has been divorced for five years and he makes it clear to her that he is ready to date again.  Henri must decide, does she want to help her family business get back on track, or does she want to finish the big corporate deal that will help her keep her current job?

I loved this book.  Viola Shipman (pen name of Wade Rouse) writes vivid characters with great depth.  I loved Henri, Sofie, Shep, and Henri’s entire family.  I could imagine Henri trying to find success in the world, but suddenly realizing all that she misses as she has strived for success.  She also has great flashbacks and memories of her Grandma that help her to shape her decisions as the novel progresses. I enjoyed that Henri was a class of ’85 graduate and a generation X protagonist in her fifties.  The only time I had to stretch my imagination was besides Henri’s parents still running their business, it seemed like there were a lot of people that worked at her family’s store still there from her childhood.  They would mostly likely be in their late 70’s or 80’s and that seemed to be stretching it on age to me.  The romance was sweet, and the setting was perfect.  I loved that Wegner’s was a veiled version of the real-life Bronner’s.

The extras is this novel are a treat.  The novella Christmas Angels is at the back of this book, as well as book club questions, and a very thoughtful letter to the readers.  I loved this quote in the letter, “The Wishing Bridge is about choice we make in our life – some good, some bad – but realizing if we have a strong foundation, it is never too late to cross that bridge in our lives to become the people we dreamed we could become.”  What a perfect description.

Favorite quotes from the novel:

“Memories serve as the voice to our souls, the soundtrack to our lives.”

“The holidays are hard for a lot of us.  Too many people acting like the world is perfect when others are battling a lot of bad memories, or loss.”

“It’s humbling and a bit terrifying to realize, when you really stop to think about it, that when you reach the age of fifty, there are only, perhaps five people in the universe who truly ‘get’ you.  And the sad part?  They all now probably live in a different city than you.”

“Time, there is never enough.”

The Wishing Bridge by Viola Shipman is a heartfelt, perfect novel about Christmas, the importance of family, and how it is never too late to make a change in your life.  I highly recommend it.

Book Source:  Review copy from Graydon Books as part of the TLC Book Tour. Thank-you!  Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

About The Wishing Bridge

• Publisher: Graydon House (November 7, 2023)

• Paperback: 336 pages

Workaholic Henrietta Wegner can feel her edge beginning to dull in middle age. Once the company’s hottest mergers and acquisitions executive, Henri can see the ambitious and impossibly young up-and-comers gunning for her job. When her boss makes it clear she’ll be starting the New Year unemployed unless she can close a big deal before the holidays, Henri impulsively tells him that she can convince her aging parents to sell Wegner’s—their iconic Frankenmuth, Michigan, Christmas store—to a massive, soulless corporation. It’s the kind of deal cool corporate Henri has built her career on.

Home for the holidays has typically meant a perfunctory twenty-four-hour visit for Henri, then back to Detroit as fast as her car will drive her. So turning up at the Wegner’s offices in early December raises some eyebrows: from her delighted, if puzzled, parents to her suspicious brother and curious childhood friends. But as Henri fields impatient texts from her boss while reconnecting with the magic of the store and warmth of her hometown, what sounded great in the boardroom begins to lose its luster in real life. She’s running out of time to pull the trigger on what could be the greatest success of her career…or the most awkward family holiday of her life.

About the author

Wade Rouse is a popular award-winning memoirist and internationally bestselling author of twelve books, which have been translated into twenty languages and selected as Today show Must-Reads, Indie Next Picks and Michigan Notable Books. Rouse writes fiction under his grandma’s name, Viola Shipman, to honor the woman whose heirlooms inspire his writing. He lives in Michigan and California, and hosts Wine & Words with Wade, A Literary Happy Hour, every Thursday.