Ellen Baker's Blog

Hi there,

It was the first warm spring day of the year today in Maine, and I took a walk at the oceanfront point that inspired my novel Summerland Cove. So beautiful!

I recently created a short video trailer so you can see the world of the novel. You can watch it right here.

I also put together a playlist inspired by the book, with music from the 1970s and 2010—the two time periods the story moves between.

☀️☀️☀️

If you're in Maine (or if you'd just like to visit :), you're invited to the Summerland Cove launch party!

Tuesday, June 2 at the Wiscasset Yacht Club in Wiscasset, Maine

Open House from 6-8 p.m.
Short reading/talk at 6:30 p.m.

We’ll be recreating the menu from a party in the opening pages of the novel, so it will feel a bit like stepping into the story. Book sales will be by Fiction Bookshop of Wiscasset.

You can find a list of all my upcoming events on my website.

☀️☀️☀️

If you’re drawn to stories of reinvention—and the idea of rewriting your own life intrigues you—I’ve created a space called The Next Chapter Studio for women ready to author what comes next. You’re always welcome to step inside and explore.

☀️☀️☀️

Thank you. I'm truly excited to share this story -- and a bit of Midcoast Maine life -- with you.

Warmly,
Ellen



P.S. A new Goodreads Giveaway opens on April 22, if you’d like to watch for it. :)

Hi there,

☀️ Things are getting exciting here as the June 2 release of SUMMERLAND COVE approaches!

- I'm planning a book launch party at the Wiscasset Yacht Club in Wiscasset, Maine, on the evening of June 2. Everyone's invited! Details to come.

- The video trailer is nearly done! I'll send an email when it's released.

- Early reviews are in here on Goodreads! One says, “Is it too soon to decide that a book will probably be one of my favorites of the year? Wow, wow, wow. I will be recommending this book to everyone once it comes out in June. Add it to your list now - it is absolutely perfect in every way. ” :)

- A giveaway for a signed advance copy just opened on the Erudite Bibliophile with Wanderlust Facebook page. Click here to watch a quick video, then share, like, or comment to enter to win.


WHAT TO WATCH FOR NEXT:

A sneak peek in your inbox of SUMMERLAND COVE.

Book event announcements

More giveaways

Final cover design reveal (there have been tweaks ;)



I'm also lining up a number of interviews. Here's an interview that was just recently re-released about THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON you can watch now. Also, CECILY is a Kindle deal right now if you want to grab an ebook for only $1.99.

✨ In April, I'm launching my new mindset coaching offering: The Next Chapter Studio for high-achieving women ready to dismantle inherited standards and consciously author what comes next using my signature Identity Rewrite Method. Learn more here and sign up to be the first to know when the Studio doors open.

Meanwhile, thank you, as always, for your support!

All my best,
Ellen

Hi there!

❄️ It's been cold and snowy here in Maine for the past several weeks. In the newsletter I emailed out today, I included a picture I took just a few days ago on a walk near where I live of a creek surrounded by snow-covered trees. Now the creek is frozen over. Sending you good thoughts no matter where you are… and extra love to my friends and family in Minnesota and my neighbors in Maine.

📚 I've been burrowed in writing my next novel (currently scheduled for 2028) and am about ¾ through a draft. Now I'm excited to be shifting my focus toward the June 2 release of Summerland Cove!

- I just had a kickoff meeting on Monday with my amazing team at Mariner Books, who have such wonderful, exciting plans for bringing this novel to the world.

- I'm very grateful for everyone who's reviewed it here on Goodreads so far. Thank you, thank you, thank you! And to those who've added it to your want-to-read shelf, as well!

- I also just got to weigh in on selecting narrators for the audio book (all three main characters are being cast, which is exciting)…

- And advance copies/galleys just arrived! Click here to watch a video of me unboxing them. They are absolutely gorgeous!

🧐 Sign up to get a list of 20 of my all-time favorite novels here and you'll receive a sneak peek of Summerland Cove in your inbox, along with my monthly (occasionally more often :) newsletter.

🎬 You'll also be among the first to know when the video trailer is released!

✨ Another piece of exciting news: Those of you who know me well know that I'm also a certified mindset coach, Reiki healer, and intuitive. I'm excited to be launching a brand-new series of identity-based coaching offers for high-achieving women in the coming months. Check out my new author + coach website here and stay tuned for details!

Meanwhile, sending you all my best wishes, and my gratitude, too -- and looking forward to summer!

Hi readers,

I'm so looking forward to sharing my new novel Summerland Cove with you -- it releases on June 2! For now, here's a bit about what inspired the story and how I went about writing it from my home on the coast of Maine.

***

On a perfect July evening in the summer of 2024, I went for a walk around an oceanfront point lined with summer cottages near where I live in Midcoast Maine and spotted a big extended family (I was sure I saw three generations, from ages eight to eighty or so) gathered on the front porch of an old yellow cottage, talking and laughing and snacking.

I knew the cottage sat empty for most of the year, because I walk past it in all seasons, and from the license plates on the cars I could tell that these people had come from all over the country to gather. As I walked past, a next-door neighbor came out of his cottage with a plate of charcuterie and a bottle of wine, heading over to hang out with his summertime neighbors on their porch. The whole scene sparked a thought of what it would be like to gather every year like that – in such an idyllic place, with family and friends you’d see probably only once a year – for the best two weeks of the year in Maine. And then of course, being a novelist, I had to start thinking about all the things that could go wrong.

First, I had to step back and decide who my families, the characters in the novel, would be. I’ve lived year-round in Midcoast Maine for most of the last fifteen years, but as a transplant from the Midwest, I’m still—and will always be—considered “from away.” (Rightly so, it seems to me.) I decided to make my families “from away” like me, so that their experience would be closer to mine.

I also decided to make them, like the family whose cottage I’d walked past that day, “summer people” who’ve been coming to the same cottages for generations. This was a way to stretch my imagination—I have a small family of origin, no kids of my own, and a personal history of something like forty moves. While I’ve loved getting to experience life in many different places, in the process of writing this novel, I also enjoyed imagining a different life, one with a steadier foundation and a beloved place to return to year after year.

Next, I wanted there to be a lot at stake, so I decided that the family would be planning to celebrate three special occasions—a 50th birthday, a 50th anniversary, and a wedding—over the course of three weeks. How things could go dreadfully wrong, I decided, was if the guest of honor at the first event not only didn’t show up but totally vanished.

From here, I decided to set my story in 2010, which was the year I first moved to Maine, when spotty cell signal and other factors would allow a person to actually go missing. Then I worked to develop characters who would make the story I wanted to tell not only seem realistic but also unfold in a dramatic way:

• David, 50, the guest of honor at the birthday party, is an absent-minded, idealistic, troubled Innocence Project lawyer who hasn’t yet accepted cell phones as a part of life.

• Lindy, 48, his wife, obsessed with organizing the three events at her family’s beloved cottage in Maine, has been inattentive to her husband the past few months.

• Hailey, 25, their daughter, is the oldest of four, and, on the verge of getting married and starting law school, feels the pressure to be the perfect daughter.

• Greta, 81, Lindy’s mother, has spent every summer of her life at her family’s cottage, Innisfree; she has hated it for the last 69 of them, never telling anyone why, but now she’s secretly making plans to sell.

Another factor of life in Maine that I knew would play a role in the story was the warm, friendly communities we have here and the accompanying well-meaning gossip. Having spent most of my life living in small towns, I love writing about community and how who knows what about whom—and when they know it—affects the story.

As I began to write, it turned out that each of the characters provided rich emotional terrain to explore. They allowed me to imagine the experience and consequence of things I haven’t faced myself (having and raising a family of four kids, for example) and to work through others that I have (past trauma, relationship troubles, etc.).

I also took the story back and forth in time, as I love doing in all my novels, to explore the connections between the past -- especially David and Lindy's young love story in the 1970s and 80s -- and the present.

In the process, I found that I returned to questions that have always been of interest to me. What does it mean to belong? How can we measure the effect we have on others or the importance of each individual in the fabric of a community or family? What’s the effect of unhealed trauma across the generations? Is it possible to keep secrets? Is it harmful to? How do you know if you’re marrying the right person? How do you know when you’re saving someone or hurting them? How much do good intentions count?

And what, in the end, does it mean to find the way home?

Hi readers,

I'm so excited to announce that there's now a reading group guide available for my historical novel The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson.

This absolutely beautiful free pdf includes discussion questions, an author Q&A, and recipes from the world of the novel to serve at your meeting. Sign up right here to get the guide sent straight to your inbox.

Recipes included are: Liz's applesauce spice cake, Lucky's grandma's 15-layer cake, the Cecily cocktail, and Bess's tuna noodle hotdish.

The tuna noodle hotdish is a recipe I first learned to make when I was about twenty years old. I made it again just a couple weeks ago for the first time in ages and it was a huge hit!

Liz's applesauce spice cake is actually a recipe that my mom made frequently when I was growing up in Minnesota and Wisconsin. It's always been one of my favorites.

And the Cecily cocktail was created by some friends of mine in response to my saying that, like Cecily, it should be "sparkly and bittersweet."

The author Q&A will give you behind-the-scenes insights into the characters, the story, and how I went about writing the novel. And the discussion questions will guarantee you'll have plenty to talk about during your meeting.

I would love to share this guide to The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson with you and your book club. Again, you can grab it right here.

Happy reading, and thank you!
Ellen

Would it be possible to live for decades in a small town while keeping the secrets and stories of your past hidden? And what would happen once those secrets came out? THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON began in my mind with these questions.

Anyone who’s lived in a small town – as I have for most of my life, in the Midwest and in Maine – knows the near-impossibility of keeping a secret from well-meaning neighbors. Given this, I also wondered: Is reinvention ever truly possible? Or do the ideas and perceptions that people have about and of us keep us fixed squarely in the roles that we’ve always played?

Sitting down in early 2021 to plan the novel I would write, I knew right away that my fictional town would be in northern Minnesota, where I was born and which is still, even after all the years I’ve spent away, the place that feels to me the most like “home.” I also knew that my main character would be a conventional-seeming, privileged doctor’s wife, a pillar of the community with an excellent reputation and a long involvement in making her small town a better place to live. I wanted her to be someone with a great deal to lose; someone whose fall from grace – if she did indeed fall – would be spectacular (at least in small-town terms).

But what would be the secrets of her past? What would be consequential enough to still matter, after decades of keeping people in the dark? What sort of secrets would continue to reverberate throughout the lives of all the members of her family?

Having watched my share of "Long Lost Family" on TLC, a show about people finding lost family members through DNA results and research, the answer seemed obvious to me: a lost child. But how could I make Cecily’s early years even more dramatic? For this, I looked to my own memories, and a couple of things popped up.

First, when I was a little kid, I had a giant poster of a bareback rider hanging in my bedroom. I remember lying awake looking up at the image. So terrifying! So exhilarating! The lady looked serene, balanced precariously on one leg atop a fast-moving horse, but she also looked like she could fall at any moment. I think this has seemed to me a good metaphor for life ever since, and it also seemed like a pretty interesting secret for a mother to have kept from her family – that she used to be a circus star. I also knew that the world of the circus would make possible the kind of forbidden relationship that I had in mind for Cecily to have.

Another thing in my memory that it turned out I could use: I had a first love when I was fifteen, and he ultimately disappeared – back in the days before Facebook and Google made such a thing impossible. Twenty years passed before I knew what had happened to him.

Finally, I always seem to return to exploring themes of “home” and “forgiveness” in my writing. What does it take to find or create these things?

So, putting all of these pieces together, I gave Cecily an early life as a circus bareback rider and a lost first love who comes back to haunt her at age 94, when an at-home DNA test reveals that a baby she gave birth to then – a baby she’d been told had died at birth – is still alive, bringing to light the secret that she’s kept hidden for decades, and throwing into question everything about the family she’s raised and claimed as “her own” for nearly 70 years.

In the end, I think the question that fascinated me most was: When it seems that all is lost, what is it that remains to be found?

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON is ultimately a story about hope, and about the power of love to heal and save us, even in the face of profound and devastating losses.

The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson

Grab a free Reading Group Guide for THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON, including discussion questions, author Q&A, and recipes to serve at your book club meeting.

Hey everybody!

Just a quick post to say that tomorrow, Thursday, November 21, at 7 pm Eastern, you can hear me on Maine Public Radio talking about The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson. It's MPR's All Books Considered Book Club pick for November!

Click here to listen to (and watch!) my conversation with host Bill Nemitz from wherever in the world you are.

So excited for this -- I hope you'll tune in!

Thanks so much for your support,
Ellen

Hello, everyone, from the sunny, snowy, muddy coast of Maine! I love this time of year here, when the days are just warm enough to create a few puddles in roads and driveways, but a coating of snow remains in the fields and everything refreezes overnight. I’m working on a new novel now that’s partially set in my adopted home state of Maine, but my new novel, THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON, is set mostly where I’m originally from – northern Minnesota. The novel opens in February and I definitely brought in some characteristic subzero temps and incredibly dark starry nights. (I love both places, and only when I’m scraping ice off the windshield of my car do I ever stop to wonder why I’ve always chosen to live in colder climates. Hmm.)

But enough about the weather. I am so excited to share THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON with you – in less than two weeks now! It's about 94-year-old Cecily, a small-town doctor’s wife whose family decides to surprise her with an at-home DNA test for four generations of their family. When the unexpected results not only bring to light the tragic love story that Cecily has kept hidden for decades but also throw into question everything about the family she’s raised and claimed as her own for nearly seventy years, Cecily and everyone in her life must decide who they really are and what family – and forgiveness – really mean.

This novel was inspired by my curiosity about what it would take to keep a significant secret while living in the same small town for 70 years – and then what would be the consequences of that secret once it came out. The story also explores themes I’ve long been fascinated by – home, forgiveness, family, reinvention. What does it take to find or create these things? I also wanted to write about someone who faced extraordinary challenges and managed to come out with their hope and optimism – and their belief in love – intact. The story goes back and forth in time to explore just exactly how Cecily has managed to do that, over the course of her long life.

I recently talked about my inspirations and writing process for CECILY in an interview on the Resilient Writers podcast. If you're interested, you can listen here.

You can also watch the video trailer right here. (I did not create it myself, and so I can freely say IT IS AMAZING!)

If you're on my mailing list or we’re connected on social media, you probably already know that I'm doing a limited number of events to celebrate the release of CECILY. If you’re in Maine or Minnesota, I’d love to see you at one of them! Here are the details:


PORTLAND, ME: Tues, Feb. 20, 7 pm, at Print: A Bookstore. In conversation with W.S. Winslow, author of THE NORTHERN REACH.

MINNEAPOLIS: Sat., Feb. 24, 2 pm, at Big Hill Books. A talk, Q&A and signing.

DULUTH: Tues., Feb. 27, 6 pm, at Bookstore At Fitger's. In conversation with author Lorna Landvik. (This is a ticketed event. :)

Visit my website for more information!

Follow my Instagram page for contests, giveaways, and all the latest news!

Finally, for book club leaders and members! I have had so much fun talking to book clubs with my previous two novels, KEEPING THE HOUSE and I GAVE MY HEART TO KNOW THIS. If you'd like to talk to me about THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON, just email me with your meeting details at ellenbakernovels @ gmail.com and I'll do my very best to be available to Zoom on your meeting day. I know you'll find a lot to talk about in this novel, and I would be honored to join you for your discussion.


THANK YOU SO MUCH! The early support for this novel has been incredible, and I am so excited for it to be out in the world soon.

Hope to see you at an event, or hear from you with your book club meeting request or your thoughts on CECILY!

All my best,
Ellen

P.S. Want to learn more? You can watch a three-minute video about the story behind the novel here.