Reeling

RayAnnes next adventure takes our intrepid heroine, haunted by her beloved grandmothers death, to New Zealand to film a new season of her all-women fishing talk show What stage of grief is it when your grandmothers ghost keeps popping up on your electronic devices? Denial? For RayAnne that seems to be the stage for launching the second season of Fishing!in New Zealand. Ready or not, she is taking public televisions first all-women fishing talk show on the road, putting the cold Minnesota winter in the rearview mirrorwhich, it turns out, Gran is haunting, too. After a challenging first season, and RayAnnes serendipitous ascension to host, theres a lot at stake. With camera-wielding twins Rongo and Rangi along as crew and tour guides, RayAnne and her indefatigable producer Cassi set out across New Zealand in search of noteworthy women who fish: a skipjack boat captain navigating sexist harbors; a writer of historical suffragette fiction, which is, apparently, a thing; a reclusive Mori octogenarian who ties fishing flies for dignitaries. Their stories, and a good dose of the countrys history, are almost enough to take the edge off RayAnnes homesickness and grief, to say nothing of jetlagand it doesnt hurt to discover a bird dog who fishes, an anti-fashionista, a pair of sisters fishing their way through recovery, and . . . a Hobbit? Meanwhile, the romantic and family entanglements she left behind at home havent exactly come untangled in her absence. Those who met RayAnne in Fishing!, Sarah Stonichs first outing with the intrepid, accidental talk-show host, will encounter familiar and unexpected pleasures in her latest anticsand a story whose lighthearted surface and surprising depths will charm readers who now find her for the first time.