How To Age Disgracefully

How To Age Disgracefully
By Clare Pooley
Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 2024. 337 pages. Fiction.

When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens' Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she'll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards. The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign--but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide. When the city council threatens to sell the doomed community center building, the members of the Social Club join forces with their tiny friends in the daycare next door--as well as the teenaged father of one of the toddlers and a geriatric dog--to save the building. Together, this group's unorthodox methods may actually work, as long as the police don't catch up with them first.

This book is a truly wild ride. From the very beginning, I was captured by characters that were flawed (and in most cases, criminal), but loveable nonetheless. Though there is plenty of hi-jinks and humor to be had, particularly in the sassy and acerbic remarks of the septuagenarian Daphne, I was also captured by sequences that managed to be utterly heartfelt and sweet as various characters dwell on musings of a life lived and expectations changed through the years. The book contemplates the ups and downs of life from beginning, as with infant Kylie and toddler Lucky, through the turbulent middle years of teen father Ziggy and middle-aged empty-nester Lydia, all the way to the twilight years of our explosively energetic and distinctive members of the Senior Citizen's Social Club. The result is a humorous, heart-tugging comedy that skillfully weaves all characters together in a rip-roaring plot that will teach you, once and for all, how to age disgracefully.

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-MD