Lunch Ladies
Formats: E-Book, Audio, Paperback
Ages: 18+
Winner of the 2025 WOMEN IN PUBLISHING SUMMIT AWARD FOR BEST FEMALE DEBUT.
Runner-up for HISTORICAL FICTION, from the 2025 INDIE AUTHOR PROJECT.
Winner of a READER VIEWS BRONZE AWARD in General Fiction/Novels.
"Readers who love nostalgic small-town tales will devour Carr's debut." - BookLife.
A TREASURE OF BOOK CLUB FICTION. Lunch Ladies captures time and place with laugh-out-loud humor, and reach-for-a-tissue heartache, as the people of Hanley, Minnesota - living and dead - come together for a community celebration.
For lovers of women’s fiction with characters who linger long after the close of a book, Lunch Ladies immerses readers in lives and relationships that are joyful, troubled, and emotionally charged. Characters’ intertwined lives, their dreams and heartbreaks, their histories, and their secrets, emerge as this story develops with startling honesty and depth.
Lunch Ladies offers a spot-on depiction of the 1970’s in small town America. As the book opens, it's 1976 and there's a bicentennial parade in the works. Is this a task for the school district's lunch ladies? Their answer would be "no." And yet Crystal, Coralene, and Sheila find themselves crafting food stands to feed parade goers, come the Fourth of July.
Crystal has other things to do: matching lonely travelers from the newspaper obituaries with kind souls still living. Coralene doesn't need this nonsense. She has a home and family, and a nephew she must save before it's too late. Is it already too late for Sheila? Her safe harbor is a booth at Denny's on Friday nights, with the only person who might help her move beyond her past.
In language both lyrical and stark, Lunch Ladies serves up a poignant, tender, and humorous view of the flawed and fascinating citizens of Hanley. The novel is peppered with wit and insight, as it captures the absurdities of family and community life, while revealing the humanity of those who've been lost, or left behind.
Reviews
"Carr delivers a quirky, small-town charmer set in 1976’s Hanley, Minnesota. Longtime lunch ladies Crystal, Coralene, and Sheila have been newly promoted to “Nutrition Services,” meaning they plan the meals, handle the supply orders, and, thanks to the hapless Gordon Hund, Department Manager for Nutrition Services, they’re now tasked with planning the food for a bicentennial Independence Day celebration... Carr serves huge slices of entertainment with that perfect small-town setup, crafting eccentric characters who immediately win over readers... Carr has a talent for spinning imaginative prose and injecting healthy doses of dry wit, though that doesn’t mean the story is lacking in deeper moments... Readers who love nostalgic small-town tales will devour Carr’s debut." Takeaway: A tale of quirky lunch ladies that will draw readers into the nostalgic past. Comparable Titles: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Billie Letts’s Where the Heart Is. Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A- Marketing copy: A-
"...Crystal, Coralene, and Shelia are all wonderfully complex characters with fully fleshed out voices that make switching between their perspectives easy to follow. It’s even easier to root for them. In other cases, things like Crystal’s obsession with obituaries or Shelia’s intense isolation might be off-putting, but here, it only makes them more endearing. The book gives middle-aged women a place to be themselves, odd or sad or tragic as they may be. They are allowed to grieve the lives they left behind, the paths they didn’t follow, the futures uncertain ahead of them. It’s a somber book sometimes, more than I expected, but it’s a welcome, soft kind of somber. Not accusatory or devastating, but a gentle undercurrent... The writing is sharp and not always in a somber way. While most of the emotion of the novel comes from reflection and grief, there is humor mixed in...Lunch Ladies radiates warmth as the women navigate their relatively average lives like the rest of us, full of complexity and loss and regrets that we’ve all felt before. It’s a truly well-written, reflective novel perfect for a book club or a rainy Sunday morning."
"Lunch Ladies is a novel about women’s friendships, community involvement, and 1976 politics and social circles in Hanley, Minnesota. It follows the changing lives and perspectives of a circle of women who find themselves pulled into a community July celebration... Jodi Thompson Carr alternates viewpoints between the ladies. This solidifies personalities that approach people and problems from disparate angles, creating a satisfying shift in perspectives that gives Lunch Ladies a full-bodied flavor of adventure and discovery as each woman navigates family, hurt feelings, anger, and new options... Discussion points at the novel’s end make for perfect pointers for book clubs and reading groups interested in a closer examination of small-town relationships in general and women’s transformations in particular. Added value comes in the form of wry humor injected throughout the story..."
