The Secret of Snow by Viola Shipman
Sonny Dunes is an award-winning, dedicated meteorologist working at a television channel in Palm Springs, California. Unexpectedly, the son of the owner, who manages the station replaces her with an AI avatar, and she, after an afternoon of drinks with a former co-worker, takes out her anger on air.
As she searches for a new job, she finds that the only station offering her a position is in her Michigan hometown. The station news manager is a college classmate that she rebuffed as a friend.
Sonny finds that she has been hired to bring the station higher in the local ratings, and she decides to accept her situation and work hard at her local 'on location' assignments all designed to feature her outdoors and enjoying winter activities.
Sonny has moved back in with her widowed mother, a hospice nurse, and soon finds that her return to her hometown means that she also has to face her past, something that she's been running from for her entire adult life. The untimely death of her little sister, who absolutely loved winter, is something that she never fully dealt with emotionally, and now she can't avoid the memories.
Along with this, someone begins a sneaky campaign to frame her as a cold, uncaring person, editing video and posting it online.
Sonny would like to move forward, and heal, for her mother as well as herself, but she finds herself cracking under the pressure.
This is a fast-moving plot with lots of interesting characters, and a small-town setting that evokes community. Sonny is a woman who has built a life distancing herself from her trauma, and she shows herself to be only too human in the circumstances.
My copy of this novel also included a novella entitled "Christmas in Tinsel Tree Village," also set in Michigan around a woman who fled a different sadness and creating a career in marketing, specializing in Christmas window displays and bottlebrush trees.
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