Publication Date: May 16, 2023
Penny Crenshaw’s swift divorce and her husband’s new marriage to a much younger woman have been hot topics around Atlanta’s social circles. After a year of enduring the cruel gossip, Penny leaps from the frying pan into the fire by heading back to Kentucky to settle her grandmother’s estate.
Reluctantly, Penny travels to her hometown of Camden, knowing she will be stirring up all the ghosts from her turbulent childhood. But not all her problems stem from a dysfunctional family. One of Penny’s greatest sources of pain lives just down the street: Bradley Hitchens, her childhood best friend, the keeper of her darkest secrets, and the boy who shattered her heart.
As Penny struggles with sorting through her grandmother’s house and her own memories, a colorful group of friends drifts back into her life, reminding her of the unique warmth, fellowship, and romance that only the Bluegrass state can provide. Now that fate has forced Penny back, she must either let go of the scars of her past or risk losing a second chance at love. Can she learn to live an unbridled life?
Penny Crenshaw’s life in Atlanta with her husband and three boys is like night and day compared to her hard-scrabble upbringing in a small Kentucky town.
Her world comes crashing down when she catches Teddy cheating. She’s simultaneously hit with divorce papers while learning her beloved grandmother Ruby Ray has died.
Author Hope Gibbs infuses Penny’s story with such vivid descriptions it’s like we are kneeling in the flowerbeds pulling weeds with her. Where the Grass Grows Blue is a triumphant story of both love and loss as a woman confronts her painful past.
Returning to Kentucky a year later to go through Ruby Ray’s house, Penny runs into the one man who broke her teenage heart. Through flashbacks, readers get a sense of Penny’s troubled childhood at the hands of an abusive father and neglectful mother. A twist of fate delivered her beloved Bradley Hitchens into the arms of a girl who had made Penny’s life miserable by bullying her.
Now, though, Bradley and Penny are both single. Will the past allow them to build a bridge for a future, or are they destined to think about what could have been?
The draw of a small Kentucky town, complete with everyone knowing your name, gives this book a down-home flavor familiar to me as a western Kentucky native. Home is where Penny can tap back into her fire when Teddy threatens to take the boys away.
Where the Grass Grows Blue stays with you long after the last page. To have a second chance at love, especially when it’s your first love, defies all the odds and opens the door to new possibilities.
Hope Gibbs grew up in rural Scottsville, Kentucky. As the daughter of an English teacher, she was raised to value the importance of good storytelling from an early age. Today, she’s an avid reader of women’s fiction. Drawn to multi-generational family sagas, relationship issues, and the complexities of being a woman, she translates those themes into her own writing. Hope lives in Tennessee with her husband and her persnickety Shih Tzu, Harley. She is also the mother of five. In her downtime, she loves playing tennis, poring over old church cookbooks, singing karaoke, curling up on her favorite chair with a book, and playing board games. Hope has a B.A. from Western Kentucky University and is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association.
Thank you so much for this fantastic review!