The Unpolished Life of Eleanor Whitfield

Eleanor Whitfield teaches people which fork to use for a living. So naturally, she just inherited a honky-tonk bar.

Eleanor's etiquette studio in Atlanta is dying — six students, a stack of unpaid bills, and a legacy from her perfectionist mother that she can't afford to keep and can't bear to let go. Then a small-town lawyer calls with news that changes everything: her estranged great-aunt Mavis has left Eleanor her entire estate.

The catch? It's a bar called The Rusty Spur in a Blue Ridge Mountain town of 1,847 people. It has a disco ball, a mechanical bull, and peanut shells on the floor. And Eleanor has to live there for six months or lose it all.

She shows up in a pencil skirt and her mother's pearls. They serve her Chardonnay from a box. In a mason jar.

The staff includes a poetry-reading bouncer the size of a barn door, a waitress who's been there thirty years, and a bartender who performs on Friday nights in a vintage Dolly Parton t-shirt. And then there's Wyatt Rivers — the blue-eyed, broad-shouldered bar manager who loved Mavis like family and isn't sure Eleanor deserves any of this.

He might be right. She doesn't know how to pull a draft beer, she's never line danced, and she once corrected a customer's handshake technique in the middle of a Saturday night shift. But Mavis left her a letter that said something Eleanor can't stop thinking about: “A place to be graceless and still be loved.”

When a developer comes after the bar with a multimillion-dollar offer, Eleanor has to decide what matters more — the safe, polished life she was raised to want, or the messy, loud, completely real one she's only just beginning to build.