title: No Place Like Home
author: Samuel, Barbara
description: Voluptuous Jewel Sabatino kicked over the traces of her Catholic Italian family and ran off with a guitar player when she was only 17--shaking the dust of Pueblo, Colorado, from her fast-moving feet. Her furious father disowned her while her mother and three sisters missed her desperately. When she's compelled to return 21 years later, with her 17-year-old son, Shane, and terminally ill best friend, Michael, in tow, her father still isn't speaking to her. Thirty or so members of her extended family are, however, and welcome her home with open arms.
  
  Jewel isn't planning to return to Pueblo for good. She needs the sanctuary of the farm she's inherited in order to care for Michael, and when he dies she intends to return to her life in New York City. But as Jewel finds herself becoming more and more immersed in the familial web, she learns that the ties that once choked and bound now represent a loving system that both support and uphold. And when Michael's brother, Malachi, arrives, Jewel finds that love can happen at any age.