A Home for Goddesses and Dogs by Leslie Connor

When something significant would happen, good or bad, they made a Goddess. The Goddesses are artistic representations of events important to Lydia and her mother. She isn’t helpless, she is a Goddess in her own right. Someone else might have an issue with how she is portrayed, but she can maintain relationships with friends and raise Belgian Hares. I was unsure if the portrayal of Florry (who has special needs, but her condition is never specified) was positive or not. Gwen Gerber runs a farm and cares for her daughter, Florry.

Jaycinda, the mail deliverer, steadily brings the mail, come what weather prevents other less hardy folk from venturing out of doors. Aunt Brat and her wife, Eileen (whose sense of humor would make the most Dad-joking father blush), take care of Pinnacle Hill and its geriatric owner, Elloroy, who is a model of positive masculinity in his twilight years. As Lydia sees the farms and community working around her, the efforts of women hold everything together. The Goddesses provide a framework of female resiliency. Despite the weather that chills me via description, I found myself longing to be in that landscape, if safe inside next to a fire. The story is realistic if a little idyllic, the Connecticut farms blanketed with snow, miles of forest and farms to hike in, everyone lives in a large house on a tract of farmland.

Connor’s characters are well-developed, multidimensional people whose emotional health becomes important to the reader. When the final stretch came, the pages flew by. Lydia’s settling in and turning Pinnacle Hill into a home takes some time to develop. All she has of her old life is the box of Goddesses she and her mother made. Her father walked out on their family when her mother’s sickness “broke” him and the sickness finally took her mother and took Lydia from her home and into the home of her Aunt Brat.

When Lydia Bratches-Kemp first arrives at Pinnacle Hill Farm, she is depressed.

A Home for Goddesses and Dogs by Leslie Connor