Spotlight & Giveaway: The Devine Doughnut Shop by Carolyn Brown

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Carolyn Brown to HJ!

Hi Carolyn and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Devine Doughnut Shop!

 
Good morning, and hello to all y’all!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Three women–two sisters and a cousin–Three women are torn between traditions of the past and unexpected new beginnings in a warmhearted novel by Carolyn Brown about family, romance, and the best pastries in Texas.

For Grace Dalton, her sister, Sarah, and her cousin Macy are the fourth generation to run the Devine Doughnut Shop in Devine, Texas. They have managed to hang on tightly to their great-grandmother’s recipe secret for their doughnuts, but they can all feel a change in the wind. The shop has always been a coffee klatch for sharing local gossip, advice, and woes. But that spring drama had begun to brew behind the counter as well as out in the small town.
Grace is a single mother struggling with an unruly teenage daughter. Heartbroken Sarah has sworn off love. Macy’s impending wedding has an unexpected hitch. And now charming developer Travis Butler has arrived in Devine with a checkbook and a handsome smile. He wants to buy the shop, expand it nationally, and boost the economy of a town divided by the prospect.
With the family’s relationships in flux, their beloved heritage up for grabs, and their future in the air, it’s amazing what determination, sass, a promise of romance, and a warm maple doughnut can do to change hearts and minds.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

*“Where’s the nearest convent or bootcamp?” Grace Dalton stormed into the kitchen of the Devine Doughnut Shop that Friday morning. “This daughter of mine needs to spend some time in whichever one that will take her.”
*Nothing to do now but get past it. Her mother’s voice popped into her head. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Remember that and move on. He’s not worth fretting about.
*Raelene looked across the table at Audrey and didn’t even blink when she said, “I don’t want to be your friend, Audrey. Why would I want to hang out with someone who treats me like you do?”
“He would want a sweet, submissive, little wife who wouldn’t try to kick a man’s ribs into pieces small enough to pass through the eye of a needle.”
*“Come here, baby girl, and give me a big old bear hug. The Internet is no big thing. We all lived without it, and you can, too.”
*“I drove as fast as I could—speed limit signs are just a suggestion when you get to be my age.
*“Thank God you have a bull crap radar.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• I have twelve granddaughters, and raised two daughters, so I had a wide choice of role models for the characters in this book.
• Several songs came to my mind while I was writing this but three of the ones that come to mind today are: “Kerosene” by Miranda Lambert; “Tomorrow,” from the movie Annie; and “Somebody’s Knockin’,” by Terri Gibbs.
• Doughnuts are my weakness, so I craved them the whole time I was writing this book.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Grace was attracted to Travis from the first time he walked into the shop and sat down with three elderly men who were regulars at the doughnut shop. There was something about his smile when he saw the older men, and the pure joy in his expression at seeing friends. But those two things weren’t anything compared to the immediate attraction—something she hadn’t felt in many years.
Travis was taken with Grace from the beginning. Yes, he wanted to use his charm to talk her into selling him the doughnut shop, but she was beautiful and more importantly, she had grit. No one refused Travis when he whipped out his check book–but Grace did!

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I don’t know about blushing or crying, but I was cheering Audrey and Raelene on when they finally bonded together to stop two mean girls from bullying.

The principal looked up from the other side of his desk. “These girls were fighting in the library. I’ve listened to each of them and have learned that Crystal and Kelsey have been bullying Raelene for quite some time. She has given me a documented account of all they have done to harass her though just this year, and she assures me that she has more journals at home.”
“The manual says that she is supposed to report that…if it’s true.” Carlita said through gritted teeth. “You can’t punish my child for something that happened in kindergarten.” She patted Kelsey on the shoulder.
“She was afraid if she reported the abuse and harassment that it would get worse,” Grace said and nodded toward Kenneth and Walter, the two fathers. “Your daughters tell around school that since you are on the school board, they can do anything they want and get away with it, up to and including not doing their homework. Raelene was afraid if she took up for herself, she would lose her scholarship for college.”
“You’ve said what?” Walter demanded of his daughter Kelsey.
Before she could answer, Grace asked her daughter, “What happened, Audrey?”
“Crystal and Kelsey came into the library where we were working on my algebra. I had just finished the assignment, and now I’ll have to do it all over again,” Audrey said.
“Kelsey grabbed the papers and tore them up, then Crystal threw our lunch on the floor and stomped it,” Raelene added.
Audrey raised her hand. “I’ll admit I threw the first punch because when they do that to Raelene, the librarian makes her scrub it all up, and that’s not fair.”
“In her defense, she doesn’t see what they do because they are so sneaky,” Raelene said and pointed at Kelsey. “After they destroyed Audrey’s lesson, Kelsey whipped out a pocketknife and began slashing at us,” Raelene said and held up her arm, “I got away, but they grabbed Audrey. Crystal held her arms from behind.”
“Kelsey said that she would cut up my face so bad that no one would ever want to be my friend, not even Raelene,” Audrey said, “and she would have, but Raelene jumped on her back, and she dropped the knife. Then the librarian came, and here we are.”
“Is there any truth in this?” Crystal’s father had a horrified expression on his face.
“Of course not,” his wife answered. “Crystal is a good girl, and these two are lying riff raff. Look at her face. Not even makeup is going to cover that.”
“She’s a spoiled rotten brat, and you’ve made her that way!” Her husband glared at his wife.
Good for you, Grace thought.

Readers should read this book….

For pure pleasure first and foremost, and then to realize that sometimes we have to walk a long way to find the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. But if we put forth the effort and climb over all the rocks and obstacles to get there, we find happiness.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m working on the second book in a three book series about the seven sisters in a book, “Trouble in Paradise” that I wrote about twenty years ago. Next up will be a women’s fiction, “The Sawmill Book Club.”
Upcoming releases for 2023 are:
April 11, 2023: One Hot Cowboy Wedding re-issue with bonus story
April 25, 2023: The Mother’s Day Crown (stand alone ebook from In Bloom)
May 12, 2023: Chasing Dreams (Audible Original)
June 27, 2023: The Wedding Gift, 3 Carolyn Brown novellas anthology
July 4, 2023: The Lucky Shamrock
Oct. 10, Paradise for Christmas
December 26, 2023: On the Way to Us.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: I will give away a copy of The Devine Doughnut Shop, a shopping bag and some surprise swag.

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: What is your favorite dessert? Mine is doughnuts with maple icing.

 
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Excerpt from The Devine Doughnut Shop:

“Where’s the nearest convent or bootcamp?” Grace Dalton stormed into the kitchen of the Devine Doughnut Shop that Friday morning. “This daughter of mine needs to spend some time in whichever one that will take her.”
“What has Audrey done now?” Grace’s younger sister, Sarah, asked.
“She sent me a text last night after I’d gone to bed and said that she had been suspended for today,” Grace answered as she slipped a bibbed apron over her head and tied the strings in the back
Macy, their cousin, who was a partner in the doughnut shop, set the bowls up on the counter to get the dough made and rising. “Good lord! What did she do?”
Grace flipped the hot doughnuts into a bowl of powdered sugar glaze, turned them over and set them out on a different rack to cool. “She got caught with a pack of cigarettes and one of those little sample bottles of whiskey at school. When she goes back after spring break, she gets to spend two days in the in-school suspension building. I’m paying for your raising, Sarah June, not mine. I was the good child.”
“Thank you for that, but honey, you were just as bad as me. You just hid it better.” Sarah turned around, saw what her sister was doing and pushed a strand of platinum hair up under a net. “I appreciate you glazing those doughnuts, but you’ve got severe memory loss problems if you think you were the good child.”
“None of us can brag about shiny haloes and big, white fluffy wings,” Macy said.
“Amen to that,” Grace said, “and I have to remember that Audrey’s father was one of those bad boy types that mamas warn their girls about. She’s got his genes as well as mine, but she wasn’t this rebellious until she started running with those two girls, Crystal and Kelsey. She was so much easier to live with when she hung out with Raelene Adams and that group of kids.”
“I’m glad that Neal and I have decided to have all boys when we start our family,” Macy said as she punched down a bowl full of dough, flipped it out on a floured board and began to knead it. “This is the last of what we’re making this morning. If we hadn’t sold out early to those fishermen, we wouldn’t have had to make more.”
“Good luck with only having boys.” Grace grimaced. “You might remember that Justin did not have a halo. Your boys might grow up to be like him.”
“No!” Macy gasped.
“Could happen,” Sarah said.
Grace nodded in agreement. She and Sarah both had a thing for the bad boy type. She’d gotten over hers when Justin deserted her, but Sarah still walked on the wild side. The three women and Grace’s daughter all lived in the same house, not far from the back door of the shop. An unlikely bunch of roommates—Grace felt that she was in the middle of the scale. Sarah was on the far-left end. Tonight—since it was Saturday and the shop was closed on Sunday—she would be off to a local bar to drink, dance and maybe even go home with a two-steppin’ cowboy.
On the opposite end of the scale—the far right—Macy was a Sunday school teacher and was engaged to be married in June. Dozens of her bridal magazines cluttered up the old yellow chrome table in the back of the Devine Doughnut Shop—the Double D as the folks in town had called it for years.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Macy rolled out the dough and cut out the doughnuts.
“It means,” Sarah piped up, “that you’ve got a fifty/fifty chance of having boys, but you could have all girls. Look at our family. We haven’t had boy in it since before Texas became a state. There’s us three, and before that there was our Mama, Liz, and Aunt; Granny and her sister, Gloria; Great-Granny, who started this shop and her sister, Edith. We are a family of sisters.”
Grace thought of their great-grandmother, who had inherited a chunk of money from a land sale when her father died. She’d used the funds to buy the acreage, build a small house and start a pastry business. She had already been famous for her pastries all over town, and her husband was off to fight in the war. Now the fourth generation was reaping the financial benefits of that small endeavor.
“And a couple of girl cousins thrown into the mix back along the way.” Grace nodded toward Macy. “Four generations of us have lived in the house and run this business, and now, I have a daughter who hasn’t got enough ambition to pick up her dirty socks. She’s more interested in being as popular as her two new friends are, than thinking about running a business in the future. We may be the last group to keep this business alive.”
Grace was glad that she’d lived on her salary from the bakery all these years and put her profit sharing check at the end of the year into savings and investments. Not that she was patting herself on the back for being frugal. Her sister and cousin had done the same thing. The one thing she missed was not having the time to spend a small portion of that money on vacations, but the shop had been open six days a week since it began, and none of them could bear to break the routine.
Audrey pushed the back door open, slouched down on a chair, and opened a bride’s magazine. Her blonde hair hung down to her shoulders and looked like a brush hadn’t seen it in a week. She tucked a strand with a blue streak behind her ear when it fell down over her right eye. Her jeans had holes all up and down the legs, and her T-shirt looked like something a stray dog would have tried to bury in the back yard.
Grace shook her head. “Oh, no, little girl. You don’t get to sit around and do nothing. See that bucket over there! Your first job is to go clean the windows, and after we close up, you get to mop the floors. You will work all during your spring break for what you’ve done.”
“Good grief, Mama,” her daughter whined. “I could break a nail, or someone might see me cleaning windows or moping.”
“Honey, that’s the least of your worries. Starting tonight, we aren’t going to clean the dining area after work. You will be getting up and coming to work with us at three o’clock in the morning. From then until five you will mop the floors, clean all the glass, wash dishes and whatever else needs to be done until we close the doors.”
“No!” Audrey popped both hands on her hips. “Getting up at that ungodly hour on is child abuse!”
“Maybe so, but that’s what you’ll be doing,” Grace told her.
“I hate you,” Audrey whispered.
The air in the shop seemed too heavy to breathe. Then Grace got a second wind and smiled at her daughter. “Well, darlin’, I love you every second of every day, but today I don’t like you so much. I wouldn’t call it hate. It’s more like mild aggravation at your choices this past year. With every choice comes a consequence. Your choice to hide cigarettes and booze for your friends, means getting up at three o’clock every morning and working right here in the shop with me all through your spring break.”
Audrey drew in a long breath and let it out in a huff. “I might as well be in prison.”
“Shhh….” Grace shushed her and held out her hand. “I wasn’t finished. Your phone, please.”
“What? Why?” Audrey sat up a little straighter. “You can’t go through my phone. That’s an invasion of my privacy.”
“I pay the bill on it, so legally, it is my phone, and since you hate me…,” Grace shrugged. “I won’t pay an expensive phone bill for anyone who hates me, so give me your phone.”
“No!” Audrey raised her voice.
“Alright,” Grace said. “Have it your way.” She pulled her own cell phone from her pocket, hit a few keys, and went back to work. “Get busy, girl. There were a bunch of little kids and fishermen with grimy hands in here just before closing yesterday and the display cases and windows need shined up.”
“I hate to do windows,” Audrey complained.
“So do we all, so we’re really glad you’re in trouble and have to help us,” Grace told her.
Audrey stood up and pulled her phone from the hip pocket of her jeans. She hit the screen several times, but nothing happened. Then she whipped around to glare at her mother. “What did you do?”
“Remember when I gave you that phone for your thirteenth birthday?” Grace asked in a calm tone, even though she was anything but that inside. “I had two apps put on it. One that tells me where you are always. The other is so I can turn the phone off whenever I want. I’ll turn it back on at the end of spring break if I feel you have learned to show some respect.”
“That’s not fair,” Audrey sputtered. “I can’t believe you are interfering with my privacy.”
Grace handed her daughter a hair covering. “Fair is in the eye of the beholder, or in this case the one that pays the phone bill. Put this on and get busy.”
Audrey continued to glare at Grace as she whipped her tangled hair up into a ponytail and took a few slow steps toward the utility room.
“Just a minute, kiddo.” Grace shook the hair net toward her. “You forgot your hair net. If an inspector comes in, we could lose our license, so put it on.”
“What if one of my friends comes in?” Audrey gasped.
“Then they’ll see you wearing a net and shining windows,” Grace answered.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Three women are torn between traditions of the past and unexpected new beginnings in a warmhearted novel by Carolyn Brown about family, romance, and the best pastries in Texas.

For Grace Dalton, her sister, Sarah, and her cousin Macy, the Devine Doughnut Shop is a sweet family legacy and a landmark in their Texas town. As the fourth generation to run the Double D, they keep their great-grandmother’s recipe secret and uphold the shop’s tradition as a coffee klatch for sharing local gossip, advice, and woes. But drama brews behind the counter, too.

Grace is a single mother struggling with an unruly teenage daughter. Heartbroken Sarah has sworn off love. Macy’s impending wedding has an unexpected hitch. And now charming developer Travis Butler has arrived in Devine with a checkbook and a handsome smile. He wants to buy the shop, expand it nationally, and boost the economy of a town divided by the prospect.

With the family’s relationships in flux, their beloved heritage up for grabs, and their future in the air, it’s amazing what determination, sass, a promise of romance, and a warm maple doughnut can do to change hearts and minds.
Book Links:  Amazon | B&N |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Carolyn Brown is a New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publisher’s Weekly and #1 Amazon and #1 Washington Post bestselling author. She is the author of more than 100 novels and several novellas. She’s a recipient of the Bookseller’s Best Award, Montlake Romance’s prestigious Montlake Diamond Award, and also a three-time recipient of the National Reader’s Choice Award. Brown has been published for more than 25 years, and her books have been translated 21 foreign languages, and have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.
When she’s not writing, she likes to plot new stories in her backyard with her tom cat, Boots Randolph Terminator Outlaw, who protects the yard from all kinds of wicked varmints like crickets, locusts, and spiders. Visit her at www.carolynbrownbooks.com.
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