It All Comes Back To You by Beth Duke

Today is my turn on the blog tour for "It All Comes Back To You" by Beth Duke published by The Art of Dixie, I am closing the blog tour.





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About the author



Beth Dial Duke is an Amazon #1 Best Selling author and the recipient of short story awards on two continents. She is eyeing the other five. Beth lives in the mountains of her native Alabama with her husband, one real dog, one ornamental dog, and a flock of fluffy pet chickens. She loves reading, writing, and not arithmetic. Baking is a hobby, with semi-pro cupcakes and amateur macarons a specialty. And puns—the worse, the better. Travel is her other favorite thing, along with joining book clubs for discussion. Please invite her to London...England or Kentucky, either is fine. Anywhere!

Please see bethduke.com for more information. Twitter @bethidee

It All Comes Back to You by Beth Duke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Time taken to read - 1.5 days

Publisher - The Art of Dixie

Pages - 300

Source - Review copy

Blurb from Goodreads

Alabama, 1947.

War's over, cherry-print dresses, parking above the city lights, swing dancing.

Beautiful, seventeen-year-old Violet lives in a perfect world.
Everybody loves her.

In 2012, she's still beautiful, charming, and surrounded by admirers.


Veronica "Ronni" Johnson, licensed practical nurse and aspiring writer, meets the captivating Violet in the assisted living facility where Violet requires no assistance, just lots of male attention. When she dies, she leaves Ronni a very generous bequest―only if Ronni completes a book about her life within one year. As she's drawn into the world of young Violet, Ronni is mesmerized by life in a simpler time. It's an irresistible journey filled with revelations, some of them about men Ronni knew as octogenarians at Fairfield Springs.


Struggling, insecure, flailing at the keyboard, Ronni juggles her patients, a new boyfriend, and a Samsonite factory of emotional baggage as she tries to craft a manuscript before her deadline.

But then the secrets start to emerge, some of them in person. And they don't stop.

Everything changes.


Alternating chapters between Homecoming Queen Violet in 1947 and can't-quite-find-her-crown Ronni in the present, IT ALL COMES BACK TO YOU is book club fiction at its hilarious, warm, sad, outrageous, uplifting, and stunning best. In the tradition of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and Olive Kitteridge, Duke delivers an unforgettable elderly character to treasure and a young heroine to steal your heart.


My Review

A duo timeline, Ronni is a nurse in an assisted living facility and that is where she meets the beautiful Violet. Violet gets Ronni to agree to pursue her dream of writing and pen her life story with stipulations to make sure she gets the job done. We flip from present day, Ronni writing and her life and back to the past to get to know all about Violet and all she endured/survived in her lifetime.

Ronnie technically is the main character and lead in the present day but Violet, oh miss Violet, absolutely the lead in EVERYTHING. The book plucks at a lot of emotive issues, love, family, rejection, loss, abuse, personal growth, abandonment - it is brimming with scenes that I think may hit home with more than a few readers.

I think the latter part of the book really scooped it all together for me, I think when you are reading a book that you can't tell where it is going to take you is always a sign of a great read. That is how I felt, I wasn't sure which way we were going, I thought I knew it would go in one direction then it would take me somewhere totally different. The amount of personal hurt the characters endure ooft I had a bit of rage, you really feel for them.

This was my first dance with this author, I would absolutely read more of their work and will be checking them out. Duo timelines aren't always the easiest to write but I flipped between the too seamlessly, 4/5 for me this time.

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