Gretchen Anthony Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Gretchen Anthony is an award-winning Literary fiction writer of The Kids Are Gonna Ask’. She is also a humorist who spent decades as a ghostwriter. The author had written for some of the best personal brands in the USA, ranging from doctors to CEOs.

Gretchen received the 2021 Alex Award from the American Library Association.

Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners was a Midwestern connection pick and the best books selected by Amazon, New York Post, PopSugar and book hub.

Gretchen’s work was featured in the Washington Post, Write life, and Medium, among others.

Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners

Violet Baumgartner is the queen of the Baumgartner Realm and the overseer of her family’s kingdom. She keeps herself busy with fundraisers, charities and events in her church. She opens her yearly holiday letter the way she has done for the past decades. This year she plans to throw her husband, Ed, a huge retirement party worth memorizing in her upcoming letter.

Everything at the party is glamor until one of the guests gives a speech of well wishes revealing a secret that makes Violet to fall on her head, leading to a concussion. Cerise has been holding a secret from her, destroying Violet’s well-planned world.

Cerise was raised well until she became an adult and is proud of the woman she has become. Violet is also proud of her husband Ed throughout his career. People know her for her ability to embrace everything with perfection.

She values how other people see or think of her. For 30 years, Violet has been writing Christmas letters named ‘The evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners’, but she never sends them and instead files them in boxes like a diary.
In the letter, violet expresses her love for her family sharing her experience when things were hard, but none of the family members had a chance to read or know anything about them.

In the series of wills, Violet wrests back control of her family, snaring her family and friends while making Cerise mad. This is an un-Baumgartner way of drama which has never been witnessed in the family.
During this year, there will be no explanation of the consequences in the Baumgartner holiday letter.
The author threw a reasonable amount of humor, emotion and surprises on each page. The novel brings to life a unique cast of deeply human characters who must learn to adapt to the change, or else they might end up losing one another.

Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners is a story featuring a family falling apart and how they use unexpected methods to get the members back together. Violet had everything planned, and one plan was to travel with Ed after his retirement. But, after the shock Cerise brings to the family, how is violet going to deal with it?

Cerise and her lover Barbara live their best lives and have a stable careers and a place to call home. She is used to her mother’s drama and way of exaggerating things, unlike Barb, who comes from a different family where she has no relation with her parents.

They thought sharing their good news with the family would go well, but instead, it created a commotion.

Violet is a judgmental and perfectionist parent focused on keeping her family organized. She had a long to-do list for her family’s betterment.

The novel shows that each family has one of those relatives, that the aunt or the uncle is the one who dominates all conversations. The author highlights that it would be wonderful if they realized that they have no control over the choices of the other members of the family.

Will Violet learn to accept the changes around her that she has no power to change? The novel is perfect for readers who enjoy lighthearted stories with a touch of mystery leading to self-reflection and love in the end.

Violet is an example of an overbearing mother controlling the lives of Cerise and Barb; however, above everything, she loves her family, which is something to be admired amidst her overbearing nature. She’s obsessed with tradition, and every annoying thing she does is out of love. Ed is trying to get used to her wild antics now that he’s staying at home and adjusting to retirement life.
The Kids Are Gonna Ask
Seventeen-year-old twins Thomas and Savannah McClair lost their mother in a car accident four years ago and are lucky to have their grandmother, who loves and adores them. As they get older, they wonder who might have been their biological father because their mother never told them. Their grandmother never knew him, too, so he could not help them.

Maggie, their grandma, tries to keep their spirits up by hosting guests over for dinner every Friday. They usually gather at her bright red table, passed from one generation to another. She has been taught that men carry the conversation and women the dishes’. After inheriting it, she kept it red as a sign that everyone has a voice and that every voice should be heard.

Now the table has become the place for holding a podcast which later turns into a quest to find the twin’s biological father. With their grandmother’s blessings, they started hosting a podcast called The Kids Are Goona Ask, where they give the listeners the information they have about their mother, hoping it will lead them to their father.

Luckily, the podcast soon becomes popular, getting a full sponsorship from a trendy media company. However, that is the point where things start going down the drain.

The twins start getting serious backlash from the public involving their dad’s rights to privacy and start wondering whether a public platform is a right place to discover their mystery.

The writing is humorous and perceptive, with an engaging storyline and witty moments. There are also twists and turns, considering how the twins became instantly famous after their viral podcast show. Betrayals, humiliations, revelations, anxieties, tested loyalties and devastations arise along the way.

There is a young adult feel to the story since the story is told from the twins’ point of view. It’s made up of original, heartfelt, quirky characters that will keep the reader turning pages. The story explores the complexities of familial love and the search for biological that soon turns into a national controversy.