Monica Wood

1963, Mexico, Maine. The Wood family is much like its close, Catholic immigrant neighbors, all dependent on a father's wages from the Oxford Paper Company. Then Dad suddenly dies on his way to work, setting Mum and the four deeply-connected Wood girls adrift -- just as the nation loses its handsome, young, Catholic president. When We Were the Kennedys is the story of how this family saves itself, at first by depending on Father Bob, Mum's youngest...

Richard Russo has celebrated Monica Wood's fiction as 'thoroughly captivating...warm and wise and beautifully written,' and Andre Dubus III praised it as 'luminous and graceful...entertaining yet transcendent.' Any Bitter Thing, Wood's brilliant new novel, is her breakout book, a timely, gripping, and compassionate tale of family, faith, and deeply hidden truths. One of its greatest strengths is its continuous ability to defy expectations.

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Rita Rosario has a gift, a way with people. She listens to them and really sees them for who they are-warts and all. And sometimes, she even knows how to guide them toward a new beginning. Women, even men, come to Rita's beauty shop for perms, town gossip, and the makeovers of their very lives. John Reed first appears to Rita in one of her dreams. When they meet at a town gathering a few days later, she immediately offers him a haircut, and her heart....