Reeling

RayAnne’s next adventure takes our intrepid heroine, haunted by her beloved grandmother’s death, to New Zealand to film a new season of her all-women fishing talk show

What stage of grief is it when your grandmother’s ghost keeps popping up on your electronic devices? Denial? For RayAnne that seems to be the stage for launching the second season of Fishing!—in New Zealand. Ready or not, she is taking public television’s first all-women fishing talk show on the road, putting the cold Minnesota winter in the rearview mirror—which, it turns out, Gran is haunting, too.

After a challenging first season, and RayAnne’s serendipitous ascension to host, there’s a lot at stake. With camera-wielding twins Rongo and Rangi along as crew and tour guides, RayAnne and her indefatigable producer Cassi set out across New Zealand in search of noteworthy women who fish: a skipjack boat captain navigating sexist harbors; a writer of historical suffragette fiction, which is, apparently, a thing; a reclusive Māori octogenarian who ties fishing flies for dignitaries. Their stories, and a good dose of the country’s history, are almost enough to take the edge off RayAnne’s homesickness and grief, to say nothing of jetlag—and it doesn’t hurt to discover a bird dog who fishes, an anti-fashionista, a pair of sisters fishing their way through recovery, and . . . a Hobbit? Meanwhile, the romantic and family entanglements she left behind at home haven’t exactly come untangled in her absence.

Those who met RayAnne in Fishing!, Sarah Stonich’s first outing with the intrepid, accidental talk-show host, will encounter familiar and unexpected pleasures in her latest antics—and a story whose lighthearted surface and surprising depths will charm readers who now find her for the first time.