Tales from the Yoga Studio by Rain Mitchell

Title:  Tales from the Yoga Studio
Author:  Rain Mitchell
Publisher:  Plume
Publication Date:  December 2010
Format:  Paperback, 288 pages
Age Group:  Adult

In Los Angeles, yoga brings together people from very different backgrounds as they stretch and breathe through their stress.  Lee uses yoga to help heal her students' physical issues but also to impact their lives in a larger way.  Four women who come into her classes at various times, for various reasons, find themselves drawn together and back to Lee as she faces the potential collapse of her marriage and the loss of the studio.

Tales from the Yoga Studio is the beginning of a series and it feels it.  The book reads like an introduction to all the characters that the reader will interact with later on.  While each of the women is caught up in her own story, and we do need to understand that back story, there was not as much interaction between the women as I was expecting.  I had the impression that deep friendships would form but so much of the interaction felt at a surface level, even with all the emotion rolling around underneath.  Imani, one of the main characters, doesn't even attend the same yoga studio as the others for the majority of the book.  She is with them in the beginning and again near the end but in between she is off doing her own thing.

All of the stories are interesting to a point but they never seem to come together as a whole.  Mitchell does move between the stories easily and there is no confusion about which storyline is which.  Hints are given for stories that might appear in future books, although I have no idea how many books are planned for the series at this point.  While Tales from the Yoga Studio was a quick and enjoyable read, I don't think I'll go out of my way to remember to look for additional books as they come out.

Thank you to FSB Associates for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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