Book 8 of the Must Love Dogs series.
(Scroll down to read an excerpt.)
Buy Must Love Dogs: Lucky Enough (#8)
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If you live in Marshbury, Massachusetts, that picture postcard perfect seaside town an hour south of Boston and the epicenter of the Irish Riviera, it’s pretty much mandatory to be a little bit Irish for the whole month of March. Preschool teacher Sarah probably should have warned John about that once they bought the Hurlihy family house. And she definitely should have told him that half the town would be watching the St. Patrick’s Day parade from their front yard.
In her defense, Sarah has a lot on her plate. Hormones are flying every which way as she and John ramp up their fertility journey, their five rescue cats get spayed and neutered, and assistant teacher-slash-housemate Polly gets ready to give birth with Sarah’s bossy big sister as her labor coach. To add to the chaos, a new garage addition with a secret exit is about to go up, Sarah’s dad is still living and dating away in his mancave, they can’t seem to get that canned ham trailer removed from the yard, and one of the dogs needs a name change. And like that’s not enough, Bayberry Preschool is filled with malarkey and shenanigans, and a wily green leprechaun is on the loose.
If you’re lucky enough to enjoy another fun adventure with Must Love Dogs‘ loveably quirky cast of characters, you really are lucky enough. Jump right in—you’ll be wagging your tail in no time.
“Whether you are a long-time fan or a new reader, jump right in to Claire Cook’s newest Must Love Dogs adventures. Your spirits will be lifted, and you’ll be charmed by the witty repartee, the twinkle in the author’s eye, a beautifully structured plot, and a wonderfully resilient main character to cheer for. —Pamela Kramer
“With so much the stress and hardship in the world, Claire Cook’s Must Love Dogs: Lucky Enough (#8), has once again delivered to us a perfect respite from it all. It is a wonderful comfort read, one with great humor and heart and substance. I can’t wait to see what happens next!”—Candace Hammond
Nobody drives you crazier than family, and nobody loves you more.
“Every time I get my paws on a new Must Love Dogs book, I feel like my pup on the verge of getting a favorite treat. I jump, I squeal, and I promptly devour the whole thing. Claire Cook’s characters are like family at this point, and it feels so doggone good to be spending the holidays with them.”—Book Perfume
“Must Love Dogs has already been a major motion picture, and now New York Timesbestselling author Claire Cook’s hilarious and heartwarming series is begging to hit the screen again.” –Nancy Carty Lepri, New York Journal of Books
“Reading about how life goes for this wacky marvelously lovable family becomes addictive.”-Pamela Kramer, Examiner
“Funny and pitch perfect.” -Chicago Tribune
“Wildly witty” -USA Today
“Cook dishes up plenty of charm.” -San Francisco Chronicle
“A hoot” -The Boston Globe
“A hilariously original tale about dating and its place in a modern woman’s life.” –BookPage
Read An Excerpt
Excerpted from Must Love Dogs: Lucky Enough (#8)
Copyright © 2022 Claire Cook. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
I probably should have warned John about St. Patrick’s Day before we bought my family house. I definitely should have told him about it before February, that longest-shortest month of the year, turned into March. And I absolutely should have given him a heads up before my father called a mandatory family Sunday dinner meeting at our new-old house.
There’s a lovely saying that everybody’s a little bit Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s meant to be welcoming and inclusive and celebratory and fun. And if you live in Marshbury, Massachusetts, that picture postcard perfect seaside town an hour south of Boston and the epicenter of the Irish Riviera, it’s pretty much mandatory to be a little bit Irish for the whole month of March.
Sunday dinner had basically come with the house. The way it worked was that several of my sisters and brothers and their kids and dogs, in varying configurations, would show up at four for Sunday dinner, once or twice a month, whenever it worked out. Sometimes they brought food, sometimes we ordered out. If our dad had a hot date, we ate without him.
When John and I bought him out, my father moved into a fancy new mancave, which completely reinvented the garage that was attached to the house via a mudroom, as well as the former secret room above the garage. I’d pictured Sunday dinner moving to the mancave with my dad so clearly. Everybody gathered in his brand-new kitchen, sitting around his tiny island, the excess spilling over to his faux-leather recliners and the perimeter of his round bed with the flashing mood lights, creating a shiny new Hurlihy family tradition.
But no such luck. Dinner stayed with our part of the house. So on those Sundays, John and I either joined everybody, got out of Dodge, or hid upstairs on the second floor of the main house and pretended we weren’t home. We even had a locked door in our new private sanctuary that protected us from the shared space below, which my two sisters and three brothers had an aggravating tendency to think still belonged to them.
This time around, none of us could even act like we didn’t remember what day it was, because our dad had finally figured out how to use the family text chain. I could see him, forehead furrowed over bushy white eyebrows, a hunk of matching white hair partially blocking his phone screen, jabbing away with one beefy index finger:
Bug family mettle
Bag famous manatee
Huge family mandatory dinner mating 4 Sanday
VEVOLOL, your flavorite dad
Apparently, you really could teach an old dog new tricks because our dad had not only accessed the family text chain, but he’d also learned how to copy and paste a text. By the time we’d all received the same message four days in a row, sometimes accompanied by a HAHA bubble, sometimes by double exclamation points, it was impossible to pretend we didn’t get it.
Annoyingly punctual as always, my sister Carol, her husband Dennis, and three of their four kids blew in through the kitchen door at 3:59. Ian and Trevor, Carol’s middle two, tromped through the kitchen on the way to the family room, three-year-old Maeve hot on their heels.
“Where’s Siobhan?” I said. Carol’s oldest daughter was seventeen. Sometimes Carol thought Siobhan and I were too close, and other times she wanted to give her to me permanently. Or at least until Siobhan finished high school.
“Siobhan is part of the mandatory mating,” Carol said. “The rest of us just showed up to find out what VEVOLOL means.”
“We’re only here to bag the famous manatee,” my sister Christine said as she floated in from the center hallway. Her three-year-old daughter Sydney ran off to find her cousin Maeve. Sydney’s five-year-old brother Sean sat down at the kitchen table with a book.
Billy Jr. was out of town, but Johnny still occasionally spent the night in our dad’s friend’s canned ham trailer parked in our yard, so he had an easy dinner commute. He walked into the kitchen with Polly, my pregnant teacher assistant-slash-John’s and my housemate.
“Great to see everybody,” Polly said. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go take a nap.”
“Nice try,” Carol said. “If you’re going to be an honorary Hurlihy, there’s no way you can wiggle out of the bug family mettle.”
“VEVOLOL,” I said.
Now that my father and my brother Johnny had at least temporarily stopped proposing to Polly, and my sisters had finally realized she wasn’t a gold digger, my whole family had pretty much welcomed Polly with open arms. Sometimes I thought feeling like she was one of us filled Polly’s heart with joy. Other times, I thought Polly really did just want to go take a nap.
My brother Michael showed up last. His daughters Annie and Lanie yelled a quick hello as they ran through the kitchen on the way to the family room to find their cousins. His wife Phoebe sat down at the old pine trestle table across from Sean and pulled out her own book.
“Mother Teresa,” I said as I squatted down to pat her. Michael’s Saint Bernard started wagging her hindquarters a mile a minute.
“That dog needs a new name,” Carol said. “Preferably something that isn’t a sin.”
“Get over yourself,” Michael said. “It’s barely venial. If that. And I think the real Mother Teresa would appreciate the tribute. She had a great sense of humor, especially for a saint.”
I made Mother Teresa sit, squatted down so I was almost hidden behind her and wiggled her front paws like a puppet. “Do small things with great love,” I said.
Imitating a dog imitating a saint definitely fell into the category of not that funny, but my siblings and I laughed uproariously anyway. The moment we got together, we had a tendency to revert to our childhood selves, where immature, irreverent humor was never off the table.
The significant others in attendance rolled their eyes.
Joe, John’s and my contractor and Christine’s husband, headed out with John to check on the site of our new garage addition for the umpteenth time.
Horatio, John’s original dog, and Scruffy Dog, the newest canine addition to our pack, approached Mother Teresa, calm and relaxed. They all snuffled muzzles, moved on to touching noses, circled around to smell each other’s butts.
Sniffing ritual complete, Scruffy Dog noticed the platter of cookies, probably left over from a catering job, that Carol had dropped off on the kitchen counter. In a nanosecond, Scruffy Dog was up on her hind legs. The platter teetered on the edge of the counter.
“Scruffy Dog,” I yelled. With one quick move, I interrupted the steal, an essential skill in the bag of tricks of a successful preschool teacher. I opened our old cookie jar, gave Scruffy Dog a bone-shaped dog biscuit as a consolation prize, handed out treats to Horatio and Mother Teresa so they wouldn’t think I was playing favorites.
“That dog needs a new name, too,” Carol said.
“You’ve already named four kids,” I said. “Get your own dog if you want to name someone else.”
I never would have admitted it to her, but Carol had a point. Scruffy Dog no longer looked scruffy. Her frame was filling out, her eyes sparkled, her fur shined. She looked at least as put together as I did, probably more. And she woke up every day filled with gratitude that she finally had a home. I could only hope her good attitude would eventually rub off on me.
“What about Saoirse?” Carol said, as if I hadn’t just shut down her dog-naming privileges. The thing about sisters is they rarely listen to a word you say.
“She looks more like a Fiona to me.” Christine squatted down, scratched her behind the ears. Scruffy Dog lapped Christine’s face.
“Where are the cats?” Carol said, probably looking for something else to rename.
“Upstairs hiding,” I said. “They took one look at Dad’s text and said they were out of here.”
“Bug family mettle,” Michael said. Their marriage must have been in a good stretch, because Phoebe looked up from her book and actually smiled at him.
On the upside, at least this particular Sunday dinner came with pizza, and our dad was buying. And because I said I’d call in the order for him, I was able to add a broccoli and spinach cauliflower-crust pizza with plant-based cheese for John and me as well as a kale-squash-mozzarella and pumpkin seed pizza for Polly and her baby-to-be.
“Gross,” my brother Michael said when I hung up. “There’s not a reason on God’s green earth to put broccoli on a pizza.”
“I’m going to have to agree with your brother,” my father said as he pushed the kitchen door open. “It defibrillates the importance of pepperoni on the food triangle.”
Our dad made a grand gesture and let Siobhan enter first. The tips of her hair were Kelly green now, which I was pretty sure meant that St. Patrick’s Day was cool again. Siobhan’s hair changed as quickly as her taste, and you could count her phases like the rings of a tree trunk. Shiny brown hair up by the roots faded to a tragic summer application of Sun-In streaks an inch or so down. An experiment with Jolen Crème Bleach and cherry Kool-Aid came next. Below that, a mermaid-like aquamarine wave glittered under the kitchen lights. And finally, Kelly green tips to match a not fully successful swathe of Kelly green eye shadow.
Siobhan and her grandfather held up big green-and-white signs attached to wooden stakes for us all to read.
Running for It!
Billy Boy Hurlihy
St. Patrick’s Day Mayor
The Irish Riviera
Vote Early and Vote Often
Keep Reading!
Buy Must Love Dogs: Lucky Enough (#8)
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