Rating: 2 stars
Date Finished: March 12, 2024
Format: Kindle
Reader Warning: sexual content (extremely brief – a memory between a married couple), an LGBTQ themed bait and switch 80% of the way through, an unreliable narrator
Just going to put it right here, there are spoilers.
I don’t know guys. I’ve thought long and hard on this book and I figure the best thing to do is just to be honest in my review. The writing is beautiful and the only reason it gets two stars.
The main character is not someone I am interested in. It’s not because she’s old, I’ve read books about old people before. It’s that she’s just not a likable person. She doesn’t seem to really like her husband and as the book goes on you learn that she never really loved him, not romantically. She didn’t want children and refused even though her husband desperately wanted children. She wanted seclusion but he loved to go out and about and do things. She never gave, he adapted to her but she never compromised for him. Perhaps it’s just that they weren’t well matched and she shouldn’t have agreed to marry him (as she says several times) and this guy, Arthur, he always took care of her and he loved her. He says he always has but part of me couldn’t help but think that he married her and took care of her because she’s his best friend’s little sister and her brother died young (25).
So the book begins and Arthur dies after 62 years of marriage and now Mabel is all alone. She goes into a deep depression and one day decides she must get out of it, she must make arrangements for Arthur’s funeral and call his family and friends to tell them. So she starts to make a list, like he always did. Oh, and she found this beginning of a list that said, “Find D” which she interrupts as him telling her to find her old best friend, Dot, whom she hasn’t spoken to for 62 years (yes, the length of her marriage). All of this, very interesting. Then a lady shows up at her house one day to take care of her a few hours a day—turns out Arthur paid for three months of a caregiver service in advance for when he died. Which—is super sweet. She makes these friendships with the caretaker, a dance instructor, and a young mom who falls in love with Arthur’s dog, and Erin- the cashier at the grocery store who caught her shoplifting but didn’t say anything.
But I have to be honest with you, Mabel is not a likable character. She decides that she knows what is best for her new friends, without questioning further what is the right thing for her friends. She goes behind their backs and orchestrates reunions that perhaps should not have happened. In fact, there’s a lot of heat with all of them but no one stays mad at Mabel because apparently you can’t get mad at a meddler if they’re over a certain age? I say nay. Meddlers have to face consequences too. Despite never wanting to be a mom, she certainly has a desire to take one teen away from her family because she has decided that they don’t love her the way that she is, her only saving grace is that she does not say this to the girl but rather encourages her to talk to her family about it. Like Belle from Twilight, there are no consequences, she gets everything she wants in the end, and she’s overall annoying and selfish.
And there’s the dog, Ollie. I think dogs can be pretty good judges of character and he doesn’t like Mabel. Granted, he doesn’t like many people but he liked Arthur and he likes the young mom who comes to take him for walks and even likes her baby and if a dog doesn’t like people they tend especially not to like babies but not him. So for me, that was actually a red flag about Mabel (really, only after all the other stuff-it’s easy to find more stuff once you decide you don’t like someone).
Now for the unreliable narrator, she talks for 80% of the book about how she doesn’t understand why she couldn’t love Arthur and why Dot has never written back to her, and why she feels certain ways about things when the whole time she knows exactly why. And she reveals that at 80% and then she goes to her husband’s grave to basically pee on it and tell him why she couldn’t love him. He was a good friend, but that was it and honestly, Arthur deserved way better than her. She kept them both from living full and happy lives and I think Arthur is lucky to have gotten away from her. OH and there was this one character, Reg, who it’s hinted at that there was some terrible, terrible thing he did. So as a reader I’m like, “oh my gosh, did he try something with her or her friend when they were younger?” because it seriously felt like she was suffering from PTSD. What did he do? He told the truth, and she claimed she didn’t care about the truth coming out, but 62 years later she still holds a grudge. And he tries to be nice to her but she’s filled with rage toward him. NOW when I read it at first I thought he was a super creepy, attempted rapist, so I understood the feeling. After finding out what he did was merely words, and truthful words, not even being mean, just stating factual events that he saw, I don’t get it. If she didn’t care, why treat him so badly?
Everything in the second half of the book felt inauthentic.
Honestly, I should have known, books published after a certain (recent) year are rarely good. They’re too heavy handed with things and sacrifice plot and character development for their message and even making logical connections. If you can convince me of why something is happening, get the character motivations right, I’ll overlook a lot of things. But I just can’t overlook this one.
Lildonbro 