Embark on a Reading Road Trip

If It Makes You Happy

by Julie Olivia

🎧 Audiobook

Pack a flannel, because we're starting our road trip in the most quintessential of fall settings. If It Makes You Happy is set in the autumn of 1997 in Copper Run, Vermont, a small town so perfectly cozy it practically smells like cider and woodsmoke. Michelle has arrived to take over her late mother's bed and breakfast until her sister can step in, and she's wildly unprepared for both the work and the charm of small-town life, especially the single-dad baker next door with an infectious smile and impeccable forearms. This book was all I could think of as I drove through the charming small towns of Vermont this fall!

The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

🎧 Audiobook

From the golden hills of Vermont, we head east into the mountains and things get a little darker. Chris Bohjalian sets this atmospheric ghost story in the remote White Mountains of New Hampshire, where pilot Chip Linton moves his family after a catastrophic plane crash leaves him haunted by the 39 lives he couldn't save. Their rambling Victorian house is beautiful, isolated, and sealed with a strange door in the basement that no one can explain. The local women who befriend his wife are warm, welcoming, and call themselves herbalists, but something about them doesn't quite add up. If you’re the type of person who looks for ghost tours and haunted history on every trip, this one is for you.

The Academy

by Elin Hilderbrand

🎧 Audiobook

If you’d rather seek drama than thrills, this next stop is perfect for you. Heading south into western Massachusetts, we arrive at Tiffin Academy, an elite boarding school tucked into the hills, complete with ivy-covered buildings, a scandal-hungry student body, and the kind of secrets that only come out when someone invents an anonymous gossip app. When America Today inexplicably vaults Tiffin from #19 to #2 on its national boarding school rankings, nobody can quite figure out how and before long, the anonymous app ZipZap is airing everyone's dirty laundry, from students to faculty to the Head of School herself. The sequel just came out earlier this year, so if you’d like to extend your stay make sure you check out The Thoroughbreds!

Practical Magic

by Alice Hoffman

🎧 Audiobook

No fall road trip through Massachusetts is complete without a stop in the Owens family's bewitched corner of the state. We might not know for sure where this book is supposed to take place but I’m going to say it’s small-town Massachusetts for the purpose of this road trip (and the driver is always right). For more than two hundred years, the women of the Owens family have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their small New England town and sisters Sally and Gillian have spent their whole lives trying to escape the shadow of that reputation. But no matter how far they run, their past has a way of finding them. This is the witchy, atmospheric stop on our road trip that will make you want to linger a little longer.

The Wedding People

by Alison Espach

🎧 Audiobook

Warning: This novel deals with themes of suicidal ideation. If this is a sensitive topic for you, please read with care and know that resources are always available at 988lifeline.org or by calling or texting 988.
From the Massachusetts woods, we follow the coast down to Newport, Rhode Island, where Phoebe Stone has just checked into the grand Cornwall Inn wearing her best green dress and gold heels and no luggage. She's the only guest at the hotel who isn't there for the lavish six-day wedding filling every corridor and terrace, and the bride, Lila, is determined not to let this mysterious stranger derail a single moment of her perfect event. What begins as an unlikely standoff between two women with nothing in common becomes something far more surprising: a story about grief, friendship, reinvention, and the strangers who arrive in your life exactly when you need them.

Dolly All the Time

by Annabel Monaghan

🎧 Audiobook

This stop keeps us in Rhode Island but trades Newport's grandeur for the kind of close-knit seaside town where everyone knows your name and the wealthiest family in town literally has their name on the welcome sign. Dolly Brick is thirty-nine years old, a kindergarten teacher, a single mom, and someone who has spent her whole life solving everyone else's problems before her own. When a small fire at her family's home brings her back to Whitfield for the summer, she doesn't expect to cross paths with Stewart Whitfield, heir to the town's oldest family, recently humiliated by a very public breakup, and in desperate need of a fake girlfriend to get through the season. This book will have you dreaming of warmer days.

The Pumpkin Spice Café

by Laurie Gilmore

🎧 Audiobook

Before we head home we have to make one more stop, and this one is my personal favorite. Dream Harbor is a fictional coastal New England town that functions less as a backdrop and more as a character in its own right. There's the Pumpkin Spice Café where everyone gathers, a bookstore that sells cinnamon buns on Sunday mornings, a Christmas tree farm on the edge of town, and a community so warm and close-knit it practically glows. Laurie Gilmore has built an entire world here across six interconnected books (with a seventh coming soon), each one following a different couple falling in love against the backdrop of this irresistible town. You'll find yourself recognizing the regulars, anticipating the town meetings, and — let's be honest — wondering if you can list Dream Harbor as your permanent address. Every book can be read as a standalone, so you can start wherever you like. I’d recommend beginning with The Pumpkin Spice Café for the full autumn Dream Harbor experience!