How to Age Disgracefully

An adventurous, madcap novel about a group of rebellious British pensioners who must fight to keep their community center ‘hangout’ open.

 

In How to Age Disgracefully, Clare Pooley delivers another off-beat comedy--with a hopeful message--that brings together a cast of quirky, raucous British pensioners whose lively antics will charm readers.

 

The story is set amidst a London-Metro community center in need of revitalization—literally and figuratively. A roof collapse kills the headmistress. Lydia, a 53-year-old wife and mother--and a once in-demand food stylist who is suffering a mid-life crisis--has been hired as the facility’s new Senior Citizens’ Social Club. However, a ceiling collapse kills one of their members during the first meeting. In addition to stepping up to establish the club, Lydia and the group also take on “Maggie Thatcher,” the “ugly-looking,” now orphaned dog of the deceased woman.

 

The small club is comprised of septuagenarians who are vastly different in backgrounds and temperaments who are in search of adventure. The group includes a former businesswoman-turned-loner with secrets; an aging actor with kleptomaniac tendencies, who’s tired of playing grumpy old men and dead bodies; a retired paparazzo; a hardcore knitting addict; and woman who is ‘pushy,’ in every sense of the word, including how she navigates her walker. Lydia learns that managing the health and safety of this less-than-sedate group--on a cash-strapped budget--is no easy task. And when the town threatens to bulldoze their hangout, the group rebels in hilarious ways—complete with help from kids at the nursery school, housed in the same facility.

 

Readers are in for great fun, traveling along with Pooley’s (The Authenticity Project, Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting) assembly of madcap characters who refuse to succumb to age—or play by the rules

 

How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley

Pamela Dorman Books/Penguin, $29.00 hardcover, 352 pages, 9780593831496

Publishing Date: June 11, 2024 

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (July 5, 2024), link HERE 

A Good Life

An evocative, powerful love story about two adult sisters forced to reconcile their lives at their grandmother's seaside home in the Basque Country.

In A Good Life, French author Virginie Grimaldi delivers a sensitive, familial love story about the unrivaled, transformative bond of sisterhood. The novel is set in the beautiful Basque countryside, where the adult Delorme sisters, Emma and Agathe, are reunited after a five-year estrangement. The two were forced to come together to spend one last summer vacation at the home of their beloved--now deceased--grandmother Mima. The seaside dwelling, about to be sold, holds dear memories that have anchored the sisters throughout their lives, despite their differences.

 

During the week shared at Mima’s house for the last time, the Delorme sisters revisit bygone stories. Short, evocative chapters render slice-of-life remembrances that take readers through episodes that defined and shaped the women’s childhood and teenage years—and probe stories of family and other loves and losses sustained into adulthood. These enlightening scenes are contrasted against the women’s lives in the present. They come to discover how Mima and the “good times” they shared via her influence at the house every summer served to calm and steady them through the storms of life. The deep challenges that befall the family mark the women’s identities, personalities, and coping methods. Tensions build in the narrative as Emma and Agathe ultimately confront each other and tend to the wounds that drove them apart.

 

Grimaldi’s concise pros, translated by Hildegard Searle, is striking and vivid, painting a sympathetic portrait of the enduring bond of sisterhood. Readers will fall under the spell of a compassionately revealed story that blends poignancy and humor in depicting the transcendental nature of familial love and forgiveness.  

 

A Good Life by Virginie Grimaldi (Translated from the French by Hildegarde Searle)

Europa Editions, $28 hardcover, 288 pages, 9798889660248

Publishing Date: May 28, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (May 31, 2024), link HERE 

 

A longer-form review of this novel was also published at Shelf Awareness on March 26, 2024.  Link HERE to read the review in its original long-form.