Reeling: A Novel

Description

RayAnne's next adventure takes our intrepid heroine, haunted by her beloved grandmother's death, to New Zealand to film a new season of her all-women fishing talk show What stage of grief is it when your grandmother's ghost keeps popping up on your electronic devices? Denial? For RayAnne that seems to be the stage for launching the second season of Fishing!-in New Zealand. Ready or not, she is taking public television's first all-women fishing talk show on the road, putting the cold Minnesota winter in the rearview mirror-which, it turns out, Gran is haunting, too. After a challenging first season, and RayAnne's serendipitous ascension to host, there's a lot at stake. With camera-wielding twins Rongo and Rangi along as crew and tour guides, RayAnne and her indefatigable producer Cassi set out across New Zealand in search of noteworthy women who fish: a skipjack boat captain navigating sexist harbors; a writer of historical suffragette fiction, which is, apparently, a thing; a reclusive Maori octogenarian who ties fishing flies for dignitaries. Their stories, and a good dose of the country's history, are almost enough to take the edge off RayAnne's homesickness and grief, to say nothing of jetlag-and it doesn't hurt to discover a bird dog who fishes, an anti-fashionista, a pair of sisters fishing their way through recovery, and . . . a Hobbit? Meanwhile, the romantic and family entanglements she left behind at home haven't exactly come untangled in her absence. Those who met RayAnne in Fishing!, Sarah Stonich's first outing with the intrepid, accidental talk-show host, will encounter familiar and unexpected pleasures in her latest antics-and a story whose lighthearted surface and surprising depths will charm readers who now find her for the first time.

Fishing!, the first installment of RayAnne's adventures, is published by Minnesota, as are the first two volumes in Sarah Stonich's Northern Trilogy, Vacationland and Laurentian Divide. She is also author of These Granite Islands (Minnesota, 2013), which has been translated into seven languages and shortlisted for France's Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle; a memoir, Shelter: Off the Grid in the Mostly Magnetic North (Minnesota, 2017); and the critically acclaimed novel The Ice Chorus. She lives on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.

"This is a fun read, important and tender."-Star Tribune "There isn't a whole lot of fishing in this book but that's OK because its really about family love and the characters are wonderful."-Pioneer Press