Until her Aunt Sally died, Audrey Thomas thought New Mexico was nothing more than a place people flew over on their way to Phoenix. When Aunt Sally leaves everything to Audrey—house in Albuquerque, car, and a large sum of money in the bank—Audrey plans to clean out the house and sell it, returning to Kansas City in time to start the fall semester as a high school teacher. But everything changes when she meets the neighbors, three elderly ladies, who were Sally’s best friends, and they welcome her into their lives. Soon she meets another neighbor, Vince, a handsome doctor to whom she is instantly attracted. She finds herself reading Sally’s journals and having conversations with Sally, who tells her stories that she never expected to hear. Glamorous Sally loved to shop, and Audrey makes it her goal to get fit and slender enough to wear a green dress she finds in Sally’s well-stocked closet. The biggest mystery is Sally’s true love. Who was he, and why didn’t Sally marry him? While Audrey continues to sort through her aunt’s house and figure out who he was, she and Vince begin to weave their lives together and Audrey finds they share more than just a possible future.

The Green Dress

Literature & Fiction

Rusk, Michelle L.

Contemporary

Chellehead Works

In That Cooking Girl, Megan Marshall's routine world, writing for a public relations firm turns upside down when she's asked to pinch hit on local Albuquerque television sharing how to make her carob cookies. It leads to a weekly gig and "That Cooking Girl." Suddenly, she's the "it girl" of Albuquerque and beyond.The people in Megan's orbit, especially her boss at the public relations firm where she works, Barry Thomas, and his friend Maria Espinoza, a Hollywood stylist, conspire to build her career to something more than just local- or even national. Set in the cultural landscape of Southwestern Albuquerque, Megan finds herself shedding her past, Barry has dreams of where she will go, and Maria is pulling together Megan's style without Megan realizing she had any style. With the film industry buzzing around Albuquerque and New Mexico, Maria's former neighbor in Los Angeles, actor Nate Matthews, is in town filming a television show called "Twilight Sands" about a motel on old Route 66. The period piece drew Maria back home to work on the show and she schemes in the background to set up Megan and Nate. As Megan climbs the ladder of her burgeoning new career, she questions Nate's interest in her, and if they can weave their lives together as Barry continues to forge Megan's career forward.

That Cooking Girl

What inspires our dreams? For Jana Danielson, it’s during a 1986 summer family vacation– the summer she’s fourteen and about to enter high school– a Route 66 trip her dad took in 1964 and wants to recreate with his family in their new station wagon. Jana, her parents, and her sisters (Katie and Lisa– Jana playing the middle sister role, sandwiched between them) venture west, exploring as much of what’s left of Route 66 with their first major stop in Albuquerque.\nWhile Jana knows she wants to be a writer and she has encouragement from her entire family– particularly a new pink spiral-bound notebook her mother Donna gave her for the trip– she finds herself questioning what story she will tell. Her father Mike books the family into the Twilight Sands Hotel on Route 66 in Albuquerque and it’s there that Jana begins to feel a connection to the past. It’s also the place that she learns her father had fallen in love with another woman all those years ago.\nIn Los Angeles, where they stay for a week, Jana meets Surfer Scott and for the first time begins to understand what it’s like to form a meaningful relationship with a boy, especially when he offers to teach her somewhat clumsy self to surf.

Route 66 Dreams

Genre Fiction

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rusk, Michelle L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rusk, Michelle L.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rusk, Michelle L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Green Dress

That Cooking Girl

Route 66 Dreams