Publication Date: July 18, 2025
Award-winning book club fiction about complicated parent-child relationships, failing mental health, and second chances. KIRKUS recommended!
It’s been ten, long years since her abrupt departure, and, with a cryptic voicemail, 28-year-old writer Charlotte Sutton finds herself back in her hometown of Lakeside, Ohio. Only this time, her estranged father doesn’t recognize her, and a surprise half-sibling has taken her place.
Chuck Sutton-newspaper editor, retired baseball player, and the town’s most beloved celebrity-is thought to have Alzheimer’s disease. The community newspaper is also on the verge of closure, and a childhood friend holds a decade-long grudge. Despite all this, there is Lakeside. The quaint waterfront community, flush with ivy-covered cottages and vintage charm, hasn’t changed even as everything else in Charlotte’s life has shifted. She intends to stay only long enough to get her father’s affairs in order.
But, to reconcile her past and unearth family secrets, Charlotte must reconnect with Chuck through his Alzheimer’s diagnosis and reevaluate her own misconceptions about growing up in the small Ohio town that still holds her heart.
Charlotte Sutton is Brenda Haas’ main character in Finding Sutton’s Choice. Through her, the reader can experience the bitterness of long-ago disappointments, the inner battles of what deserves forgiveness and what memories are just too hurtful to let go, and the baffling journey of following a loved one down the winding path of Alzheimer’s disease.
Charlotte Sutton has spent 10 years in Pittsburgh making a life for herself as a writer. Writing is in her blood, considering her father, Chuck, is a famed sports writer. But that fame, and that father, are the reason she left her small Ohio hometown. She has distanced herself so much that it takes a bit for someone to find her and call her home. Her father is showing signs of Alzheimer’s, and reluctantly she agrees to help get his affairs in order.
Charlotte expects the task at hand will be truly transactional. Her anger is thick from a lifetime of being the daughter of a celebrity who was too busy to get to know her. Additionally, setting foot back in Lakeside with the same inhabitants that relentlessly teased her is a combination that makes her blood boil. She hopes her father has arranged enough so whatever is needed of her will make for a quick in-and-out.
The themes of family estrangement and coping with Alzheimer’s are both common life experiences in modern living. The story is not quite predictable, so it was a satisfactory read. What this reviewer finds to be a hidden jewel for the book is the reader’s guide. The themes and the guide questions themselves would lead to a very rich discussion, whether in a group or between a few friends.
Finding Sutton’s Choice will stir emotions caused when wrestling with the decision to move past family estrangement to help a parent entering the world of Alzheimer’s disease.
Award-winning novelist and magazine feature writer Brenda Haas spent many years as a reporter and columnist for a Pittsburgh press. Her writing has appeared in Leisure Living Magazine, Penn-Franklin News, The Beacon, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and My Outer Banks Home magazine. Traditionally published through Ten16 Press (June 2025), Brenda’s debut novel—Finding Sutton’s Choice—is set in Lakeside, Ohio, on Lake Erie. It received a KIRKUS Reviews “Get It!” recommendation and won a Literary Titan Gold Book Award (2025), two International Impact Book Awards (Aging & Women’s Fiction, 2025), and a seasonal PenCraft Best Book Award for General Fiction (Winter, 2026).
