What do you do when you really want to get back together with your high school sweetheart, but he lives across the country and neither of you wants to move?
I really enjoyed Linda Holmes’s first book, Evvie Drake Starts Over, so I knew I wanted to read this one as soon as it came out, it just took me a while to get around to it. I listened to this one on audio, and as with EDSO, it’s narrated by Julia Whelan, one of my favorite narrators.
The main character, Laurie, is returning to her hometown in Maine from her current residence in Seattle. She’s just cancelled her wedding and ended things with her fiancé, so coming home is a chance to get away from all of that.
At the same time, it’s a small town and everyone is connected to her mom on Facebook, even though her parents moved down to Florida a few years ago. That means everyone knows about the cancelled wedding, so she can’t completely escape it just because she flew across the country.
The trip home is prompted by the death of her great-aunt, Dot, who lived up the street from Laurie and her family when Laurie was growing up.
Laurie has four brothers and no sisters and would go to Dot’s house when she needed a break from all the noise that comes with four boys.
Dot never got married or had kids, which makes her a kind of role model for Laurie. Unfortunately, it also means there isn’t an obvious person to clear her things out of the house and get it ready for sale. Her parents offer to hire someone to take care of it for them, and they do end up hiring someone to get rid of the obvious junk, but Laurie doesn’t want to just throw everything away. She feels Dot deserved to have someone who knew and loved her go through her things and decide what to keep, what to donate, and what to toss. Mostly, she’s doing it because she’s not planning on getting married or having kids, and she’s hoping someone will do this for her in a few decades.
At the same time, it’s not lost on her that this domestic task has fallen to the one woman in the family. It’s not that her brothers don’t care or have checked out, it’s just that they all have other things going on and it just happens to be a bad time for all of them. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck to be the one sister who has to deal with this kind of thing yet again.
While going through her aunt’s stuff, Laurie finds tons of photos (the old Polaroid kind, no digitals, and they’re organized by decade,) love letters from various lovers she had over the years, and among the trinkets, she finds a hand carved, hand painted wooden duck that she’s oddly drawn to. When she finds what looks like a seal carved into the bottom, she starts to think it might be worth something. That investigation has a whole bunch of twists and turns I won’t spoil, but I will say I loved the story of where the duck actually came from once they figure it out.
Of course, while Laurie’s home, not only does she spend time with her best friend from high school, she also accidentally-on-purpose runs into her ex, Nick, who has taken over the local library from his parents.
I loved pretty much everything about Nick, but I especially loved how much Holmes obviously knows about libraries. From the fact that they loan out all kinds of supplies in addition to books, to the fact that most of Nick’s time is not spent among the books, but in trying to figure out how to get enough funding to keep the library going. I also appreciated the joke about him “getting hot” and becoming a “sexy librarian.” That one made me LOL while I was doing my housework and listening to the audiobook.
Of course, Laurie and Nick end up getting back together, but Laurie is hesitant to jump in with both feet because she doesn’t want to leave her house (that she owns) in Seattle to move to Maine and she doesn’t expect Nick to leave his library and community to move to Seattle with her. She thinks that settles it, and it takes until the very end for her to realize that she’s been thinking about what she’s not willing to do and what she can’t do instead of what she is willing to do and what she can do. Not to mention asking Nick what he might be willing to do for this relationship.
I always hate it when one partner in a relationship makes the decision to break up because they don’t think it’s fair to ask the other person to do something when they haven’t even asked the other person what they’re willing to do. Laurie is guilty of that to an extent and I’m glad she finally gets over it enough to tell Nick she wants to be with him, even if she’s not sure what that looks like.
I appreciated so many things about this book. I appreciated that it centered on the love life of a woman who’s about to turn 40 and wears a size 18. I also appreciated that it was about a woman who is very happy living alone. In addition to the whole moving-across-the-country issue, there’s also the fact that she just doesn’t want to live with anyone else. She loves sleeping in her own bed and having her own space.
As someone who regularly sprawls across her entire double bed like a starfish, I completely relate to this feeling, and I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen it represented in literature.
And I love that Dot isn’t treated as some tragic version of Miss Havisham because she never got married. She loved her niece and great-niece and great-nephews. She traveled all over the world. She took pictures of everything and tried a whole lot of hobbies and crafts just because she could. By all appearances, she created exactly the life she wanted and enjoyed it for all it was worth.
Laurie is trying to do the same thing, and she’s not sure how Nick fits into the life she wants for herself, and I love that this book says it’s OK for her to want that and it’s OK for her to also want Nick, and it’s OK for the two of them to find an unconventional solution to their romance.