Totally delightful book, read immediately, especially if you, like me, enjoyed Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting. But read that first, because if so there’s a little inside joke referencing Iona here!
If I had to guess Pooley herself is likely working through some culturally imposed messaging around the worth of elderly (women) in a society that valorizes youth. She of course has explicit sources of inspiration for each novel–this one, in particular, came from reading about a (spoiler) by 60 year olds and wondering what it would be like if there was a woman in the group who was able to sneak away by virtue of being, well, an older woman. But the main gist–group of characters, bounce off of one another in many ways, mostly comedic, some serious–isn’t much different from novel to novel, and honestly I don’t care one bit.
We’ve got a
– terrible husband
– man who made mistakes with his family and needs to make amends
– quirky woman with secrets (x 3) (I think)
– shared purpose (save the community center)
And no clear path to get there, except that this isn’t meant to be a head scratcher, and ask such there’s very easy ways to get there once we’ve exhausted the zany ways to do so. The framing in particular is one of my favorites, a la Kate Quinn–we start at time point now, when everything is a bit quirky, and then flip backwards to the past and see how we got to the now, and then move forward into the future and see how our characters have changed for the better. It creates narrative tension without being overly focused on spoilers, and as a result you can settle down and enjoy the ride. The best that I can say is reading this book for the first time feels like a comfort read.