The article continues:

It is also a new path for Lee, the producer who initially made his name with successful remakes of Asian thrillers and now produces larger-canvas genre fare such as the Oldboy remake and the upcoming Lego animated movie. (He also produced the 2006 romantic time-travel drama The Lake House, starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves.)

Calling Me Home, which is Kibler’s debut novel and inspired by events in her family, revolves around the relationship between an 89-year-old woman named Isabelle McAllister and her hairdresser, a black single mother named Dorrie Curtis.

McAllister enlists Curtis’ help to drive her from her home in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati. Along the way, McAllister reveals the secrets of her past, in which she fell in love with the black son of her family’s housekeeper to tragic consequences. The book alternates between the present and the late 1930s.

Home was released Feb. 12, garnering strong reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. The weepie is proving to be a reader favorite on book sites like GoodReads, and many are pegging it as this year’s Help, which became a word-of-mouth sensation and eventual best picture Oscar nominee.

The studio and Lee now will seek out a writer to adapt the material.

Julie Kibler’s delightful debut, CALLING ME HOME has been chosen for two wonderful honors this month!

CALLING ME HOME has been chosen by IndieBound as one of their IndieNext picks for February 2013.  Browse the rest of this month’s IndieNext list and learn more about the importance of independent book selling at their website, here.

CALLING ME HOME has also been chosen as February’s Book Club Selection on SheReads.com.

Sarah Jio’s new novel Blackberry Winter made an appearance on both New York Times’ Best Sellers (paperback) and USA Today’s top 150:

In addition to these national lists, BLACKBERRY WINTER hit #1 on the Seattle Times paperback list and received this review:

Monday October 15, 2012 - Books for autumn reading: new novels by Wiggs, Jio and Macomber by Melinda Bargreen

Seattle writer Sarah Jio (The Violets of March, The Bungalow) returns with a novel whose name is drawn from a climate phenomenon – a sudden reappearance of winter weather at the time when blackberries are in flower, in May.  The year is 2010, and an unpredicated May snowstorm paralyzes Seattle just as a similar snowstorm did 77 years earlier, in 1933.  “Seattle Herald” reporter Claire Aldridge has a features editor who doesn’t assign her to write what you’d expect – helpful updates on canceled and postponed events, warm shelters available, and other immediate show-disaster coverage.  No – he tells her to write no just a story, but a whole section, on “two snowstorms, sharing one calander date, separated by nearly a century.” (This is the same department in which the food critic, traditionally an incognito job for obvious reasons, demands that a new Italian restaurant open up just for her in the middle of the snowstorm, so she can do a review.) Strange doings afood at the “Seattle Herald”! As Clair searches through the 1933 files in pursuit of her story, she uncovers sad news items about a lost 3 year old boy and his desperately poor mother; their story is told in omniscient flashback.  Meanwhile, Claire is struggling with an earlier tragedy of her own: a baby died, and a subsequently strained relationship with her husband, the scion of the newspaper-owning family.  The ingenious but highly improbable plot weaves together Claire’s research, the lost boy of 1933, and her own husband’s elite family in an imaginative denouement.

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

“– The Underside of Joy (Jan. 17, 2012) by Sere Prince Halverson, set in Northern California, features a father who drowns but can’t drown his secrets and two women – a mom and a step-mom — who have claims on the same children.

It’s “no fairy tale about a evil step-mom,” says Dutton’s Denise Roy, as it explores “the nuances of today’s tangled families.” She says that “although it starts as the portrait of loss, it builds into a celebration of what it means to be alive.”"