Category Archives: Senehi, Rose

Rose Seheni. Dancing on Rocks. Chimney Rock, NC: K.I.M. Publishing, 2014.

dancingDinah Haydock has spent her whole life in Chimney Rock, and she’s proud of the role that her family–the Flacks–played in founding the town and building the resort hotel that put the town on the map.  The town, dependent on the fickle tourist trade, has had its ups-and-downs, but Dinah has held onto the store on the main street that she and her husband inherited.  But it’s now six months after her husband’s death and Dinah has made a mess of things.  She’s been speculating on land and putting these expensive purchases on her credit cards.  She’s also been careless driving her motorcycle around the mountains.  When she’s injured on a ride, her oldest daughter, Georgie, comes back to take care of her.

Georgie is a nurse in Boone.  This extended stay in Chimney Rock will allow her to mull over a marriage proposal she’s received from a man she works with, but she’s not looking forward to being back home–too many memories, too many secrets, too much heartbreak.  Dinah’s heart was broken when her youngest child, Shelby, disappeared one night twenty-five years ago.  Georgie and her sister Ali grew up with their parents’ sorrow and with the feeling that their mother loved them less than their lost little sister.  Ali has gone on to a good life–she’s married with two children of her own–but her mother’s detachment and her irrational belief that her lost child will return have cast a shadow over her.  Ali’s husband is in service in Afghanistan, and she has enough to worry about without the awkwardness that comes when her mother enlists neighbors and the police to follow up on the latest Shelby sighting.

Georgie married, but her husband was a good-time Charlie who didn’t want children.  Now as she’s settled into her thirties, she finds herself divorced and childless, contemplating marriage to an older man who already has all the children he wants.  Seeing Ron Elliott, her first great love, again only increases Georgie pain.  Without knowing how it will turn out, Georgie realizes she must own up to what she knows about her sister’s disappearance.  Will her actions bring her family more pain or some healing?

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2014, Mountains, Rutherford, Senehi, Rose

Rose Senehi. Render unto the Valley. Chimney Rock, NC: K.I.M. Publishing, 2012.

Karen Godwell is a curator at one of the most prestigious institutions in the United States: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She has carefully hidden the North Carolina-born mountain girl she used to be behind a veneer of New York sophistication, but when her husband Joel dies, everything changes. Joel, with his writer’s soul, fell  in love with North Carolina as much as Karen tried to forget it, and he always urged her to return. When Karen gets wind that something has gone badly wrong with her family there soon after Joel’s death, it’s the impetus she needs to fulfill his wish. She and her young daughter Hali pack their things and move south, where Karen takes a job at the Folk Art Center just outside of Asheville.

But it was a famous Ashevillean who knew that you can’t go home again so easily, and trouble waits for Karen in spades. Karen fled the Old North State for a reason: her sociopathic brother. Abused and neglected by their alcoholic mother’s string of shady boyfriends, Karen and her siblings Travis and Amy had a hard life that improved only when mom left for good, leaving the children to be raised by her parents. Grandma Pearl and her farm saved Karen, but there was never any hope for Travis.

Outwardly handsome and charming, Travis takes delight in seemingly random acts of cruelty and violation. Finally he has gone too far, placing Grandma Pearl in a rest home and taking her ancestral farm for himself by force. Obsessed with becoming wealthy, only his sisters stand in the way of his selling everything that their family has held dear for generations. In order to save her family’s, and daughter’s, future, Karen must finally face her childhood, with all its traumatic secrets.

The third of Senehi’s stand-alone novels set in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Render Unto the Valley is an absorbing tale of homecoming, family, and the courage it takes to face the past. Art, environmental protection, and the preservation of personal and local history are all themes that make this an enriching and entertaining read.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

 

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2012, Buncombe, Mountains, Romance/Relationship, Senehi, Rose, Suspense/Thriller

Rose Senehi. The Wind in the Woods. Vilas, NC: Canterbury House Publishing, 2010.

Jack “Tiger” Morrison is an honorable man.  He has balanced the competing demands of family and his strong environmental creed. Together, he and his wife, Susan, created a family and started a successful camp for children in North Carolina’s Green River Valley.  Susan has been dead for some time, the victim of a drunk driver, but his daughter Sammy helps him run the camp.

Tiger’s love of the camp and love of nature is as strong as ever, but lately he can’t help but notice that the property around the camp is being bought by developers. How can he hold on to the camp–should he even try? What does Sammy want?  Tiger has a feeling that this will come to a head soon, but he is unprepared for the other developments of this eventful summer when a serial killer is stalking women in the mountains.  Senehi mixes difficult and horrifying elements–the murders and the threats to Tiger’s way of life–with warm elements such as a young camper’s growth and a pair of romances.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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Filed under 2010, 2010-2019, Henderson, Mountains, Senehi, Rose, Suspense/Thriller

Rose Senehi. In the Shadows of Chimney Rock. Boone, NC: Ingalls Publishing Group, 2008.

Since Elizabeth Tarrington went to a lot of trouble to make it look like her husband died in the Vietnam War, she’s angry when he informs her that he will be including their daughters in his will. One daughter, Hayden, goes to visit him in Asheville, but she discovers that her father died only a few hours before her arrival. The main plot centers on the competition between developers and a conservancy group for control of land in the Hickory Nut Gorge that Hayden and her sister inherit, but Hayden also faces the mysteries of her father’s two “deaths,” the challenges of running his art gallery, and the possibilities of a new romance. The local details of In the Shadows of Chimney Rock add realism to the story: Ben, the novel’s ex-football-star-turned-environmentalist, teaches at Warren Wilson College; the art gallery is in the Grove Arcade; and real land conservancy groups continue to work to protect Hickory Nut Gorge from developers.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library Catalog.

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2008, Buncombe, Mountains, Mystery, Rutherford, Senehi, Rose, Suspense/Thriller