Until the Sourwood Blooms

She came for the honey. She stayed for the bloom.

June Marchetti built the best dessert of her career on a jar of Blue Ridge sourwood honey. Then a food critic sent the honey to a lab, and the lab found syrup.

With a flagship restaurant to open and a wedding on the calendar, June drives south to find the real thing herself. She finds a swarm of bees on her rental car, a crossroads store that sells fishing licenses and pie, and Wes Ashby, a quiet beekeeper who tells her the sourwood won't bloom for six more weeks.

So she waits. She cooks for the farm's small tasting room, learns to read a frame of brood, and spends a mountain summer beside a man who counts everything and asks for nothing. But June wears an engagement ring, a New York kitchen is holding her place, and she has followed the same plan since she was nineteen.

Some things can't be rushed. Honey is one of them.

Inside this novel

• A warm, closed-door small-town romance told from both June's and Wes's points of view
• One summer on a Virginia honey farm, from the first swarm of May to the first frost of November, in five parts named for the seasons of the hive
• Pencil pages from the bee book of Amos Ashby between the parts, written to reflect real beekeeping practice
• Restaurant kitchens and a farm tasting room, a brook trout in a cold stream, and a crush pad in October
• A full-page map of Bee Tree Run Farm
• A complete standalone novel with no cliffhanger

Pour something cold, find a porch, and start reading.