This was the first novel by Liza Palmer I have read but it won’t be the last. In Nowhere but Home: A Novel the main character, Queen Elizabeth Wake, decides to come home to North Star Texas, the town she left to escape. For 15 years since she has moved from one chef job to another, one city to another, one non-home to another. Each time she lets herself get fired, usually for a bad attitude that isn’t leavened enough by her cooking skills.
Nowhere but Home is not a romance, more a coming of age story.
The story opens with Queenie getting fired from her chef job in New York (for objecting to a customer using ketchup on his eggs) and deciding to come home to North Star, at least for a while to visit her sister and nephew. The story is complicated by Queenie’s mother, the town ne’er do well and tramp, who was murdered while committing adultery in her lover’s bed about 15 years before the story opens.
The shadow of the mother, and several generations of mothers before, unwed, ill-educated, greedy and selfish, taints every memory Queenie has. Since North Star is a small town, the diapproval follows Queenie and her sister Merry Carole, despite the fact both women lead blameless lives.
My one problem with Nowhere but Home is that the town gossips still care enough about Queenie and Merry Carole to fabricate stories and make their lives miserable, and both ladies allow it. It’s frightening to think that bad high school memories could be this strong, this deadly, but ask anyone who has an upcoming reunion and most will have something like this hanging over them. We all continue to grow up, even after we are nominally adults, and putting bad teen memories and cruel gossip where it belongs takes maturity.
Liza Palmer is an excellent writer with a gift for making her small town setting come to life and for making us care about Queenie, mixed up though she is. There isn’t a lot of action here and Queenie does a lot of cooking. I found the gossiping women of North Star hard to believe but otherwise the characters are strong and well done. I already reserved a second Liza Palmer book from the library.
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