The Gardens of Covington joyously celebrates women and friendships, families and love, laughing through the tears, thinking with the head and the heart. The ladies, so real and inspiring, will make you wish they were your neighbors.

If this is your first visit to the small town of Covington, you'll feel comfortably at home in the white farmhouse with the yellow shutters on Cove road that once again teems with warmth and fresh hope for today and tomorrow. If it's your second visit, you'll be thrilled to sit on the front porch once again and catch up with old friends and neighbors.

Hannah, cool-headed and calm, battles to save their beloved hills from the rapacious development that has already ruined Loring Valley, only five minutes form Cove Road. Amelia, giddy with a newfound love, abandons the ladies and her photography to please her dashing new beau. And Grace is driven to prove she has an eye for business when she and her steady companion, Bob Richardson, open the Cottage Tearoom.

New friends and neighbors are introduced. Eccentric Lurina Masterson, an eighty-one-year-old bride, brings tears of joy to all when, wearing her childhood dream of white satin, she married "Old Man," who is ninety-one. And George Maxwell, the ladies' closest neighbor, provides an inspired solution to preserving Covington's lush hills and valleys.

Joan Medlicott writes lovingly about the complexity and tenderness of women. she writes with honesty about relationships, about love and passion, about commitment and friendship, as well as about the intricate bonds between parents and their children.

As you join the ladies of Covington through their highs and their lows, their joys and their sorrows, you will not want the book to end, nor will you wish to leave their world behind you.