Santa Barbara author and Noozhawk contributing writer Judy Crowell will be signing her new book, Widow … A Four-Letter Word, from 5 to 6 p.m. April 21 at Tecolote Book Shop, 1470 East Valley Road in Montecito.
Proceeds from the evening will be donated to Storyteller Children’s Center. The funds raised that evening will be matched by Kim and Andy Busch.
In the book, Crowell, a 63-year-old widow, is shaken out of her topsy-turvy malaise by an old acquaintance, cajoling and wooing her back to the dating world of the 21st century, a world she last experienced when Dwight Eisenhower was president.
Tackling a pile of disregarded old photos, she reminisces over the men in her life: a hormones-raging teenage Lothario in a lime-green 1950s Chevy, an 80-year-old Benedictine monk, a Johnny Walker-swilling uncle and a husband taken too soon by cancer.
After 42 years of marriage, can she share another man’s popcorn at the movies? Feel another man’s beard against her cheek? Another man’s touch? Another man’s bed?
In Widow … A Four-Letter Word, humor and tragedy intermingle as a widow — a term Crowell actually rejects — looks back at the men in her life and grapples with a persistent suitor wooing her to date and, perhaps, to love again.
Crowell is a longtime contributing writer at Noozhawk as well as a travel writer with Ladue News in St. Louis, her former home.
Her book was one of fewer than two dozen titles exhibited by iUniverse, its publisher, at last weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
Click here to purchase the book online from Amazon, click here to purchase the book online from Barnes & Noble, or click here to purchase the book online from iUniverse.