Category: Books

(Berkley Romance, 362 pages)

Sounds Like Love is a PG13-rated story that, as of this writing, ranks No. 1 in Amazon’s “feel-good fiction.” It has a romance at the heart of it, but is also a story about family and friendship, mostly set during summer at a beach town at North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Thus it qualifies as not just rom-com, but a beach read.

Joni Lark — who goes by Jo — comes from a musical family. Her grandparents owned a music hall, which was passed down to Jo’s parents. Her mother was a performer, and Jo grew up to be a songwriter of note. When we meet her, she’s at a concert of a pop star who shot to fame because of one of Jo’s songs. Although thirty-something Jo has enjoyed professional success, she herself is not famous, and so when she is escorted to a private balcony where a famous singer sits, he assumes she’s seeking a photo or an autograph, and is coldly condescending despite his dreamy blue eyes. He smirks three times in four pages, that’s all you need to know.

But Jo will have none of that, and flirty banter ensues, and also an unexpectedly intimate moment with the man, who used to be part of a boy band and is the son of an even more famous musician.

When Jo leaves the concert in an Uber, we know we will see Sebastian Fell again, even though the logistics are unclear, as she is leaving Los Angeles to visit her family in North Carolina.

Jo isn’t going home for a typical beach visit, however. Her mother has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and her father has asked her to come for an extended stay so the family can have “one last good summer” before God-only-knows-what sets in. She knows it will be a bittersweet time but soon realizes that it will also be complicated — her best friend, who happens to be dating her brother, has an edge to her that Jo can’t quite figure out, and her parents soon announce that they have decided to retire from the family business, the music hall called the Revelry that was a fixture in the community and had “weathered more hurricanes than years I’d been alive.”

Amid all this, Jo has writer’s block — she hasn’t been able to write a song in weeks and has clients waiting on her. And she has developed the strangest of earworms, strains of a tune that won’t leave her head — along with a man’s voice. Not only does she hear this stranger’s voice clearly, but he can hear her thoughts as well. They can converse silently, like imaginary friends.

OK, Supernatural it isn’t, and yet it sort of is — one of Poston’s other books, 2022’s The Dead Romantics, has been described as “paranormal romance” and her The Seven Year Slip (2023) involves a time-travel relationship. So suspension of disbelief is required with this author, who has built a large and devoted following.

So it’s important to not spend any time thinking about how this could actually be happening, but just go with the flow, as Jo and her new inner friend, Sasha, do. Neither rushes off to a shrink, but they continue about their lives, chatting up each other, and becoming closer as they do, even though they are also trying to figure out how to break this connection.

It is totally weird, this back-and-forth dialogue, until suddenly it isn’t.

Because who among us hasn’t experienced the proverbial voice — or voices — in the head? It’s only when they begin to suggest that we commit a crime that people become concerned. Of course, hearing the thoughts of another person while falling in love with them is a whole other matter, and that is no spoiler, given the title of this book.

Sounds Like Love unfolds in somewhat predictable ways; there are no momentous plot twists that leave the reader gasping. But it’s smart in its own way, and becomes more engaging as the story evolves. It’s not just a romance but an exploration of our unlived lives — what would have happened “If You Stayed” — which is, not uncoincidentally, the name of Jo’s most popular song. It is also the story of the long and poignant goodbye that takes place when a person you love is succumbing to dementia. (Poston says in an author’s note that the book came about, in part, because of her own experience losing someone to dementia, and the pain that comes from having a loved one say, “Who are you?”)

Fans of the romance genre will embrace Sounds Like Love, even more so if they’re into pop music. (Every chapter title is a line from a well-known song.) We don’t just experience songs as the soundtrack of our lives, Poston is saying here, but music is a building block of the people we become. “We were all made up of memories, anyway. Of ourselves, of other people,” Jo reflects at one point. “We were built on the songs sung to us and the songs we sang to ourselves, the songs we listened to with broken hearts and the ones we danced to at weddings.” Sounds like a bestseller, if not a movie.

Featured Photo: Sounds Like Love, by Ashley Poston

UnWorld, by Jayson Greene (Knopf, 224 pages)

If you could upload your memories and experiences into the cloud, would you? There’s an obvious benefit — having a backup copy of your brain when the original starts to fail. But what if the alternate “you” was just different enough to develop its own will, different from your own, and wants to strike out on its own?

These questions are explored in Jayson Greene’s UnWorld, set in a not-so-unimaginable future where human beings are still the dominant life form on Earth but increasingly surrounded by sentient technology. This world is full of “uploads” — beings composed of the uploaded memories of the person they came from, the person to whom they are “tethered.” This has created an ethical quagmire for society — what happens when an upload wants to be emancipated from its tether? Should uploads qualify for personhood and be granted rights?

In the midst of all this, the everyday experiences of human life go on, with adjustments: self-driving cars are the norm, household chores are obsolete, the elderly in medical settings are cared for by robots. And despite all the technological advances, human beings are still dying.

Anna and Rick are grieving, having lost their only child, a teenage son, in what was either an accident or suicide — no one can say for sure. Neither is coping well; Anna, in particular, is bewildered by how quickly people expect life to resume its normal shape. “My pain was meant to crack the earth,” she thinks, while trying to get through an evening of socialization. “And here I was, not even half a year later, one of grief’s private citizens again. Were people’s memories really so short? Or was it just that you could never stop performing — falling to your knees, rending your garments — if you wanted to keep their attention?”

Compounding her anguish, Anna’s upload, who has been with her for eight years, has suddenly requested emancipation. The upload was a gift from Anna’s husband, and although she was unsure about it at first, she came to realize that the relationship was “the first and only time I’ve ever enjoyed my own company.”

“When we synced, my memories suddenly stood up straight, marched in line. Somehow, in that moment when I transferred the millions of little impressions I had gathered through the chip in my ear, up to her, and that tunnel feeling was established, the one that provided the link between her and me, I felt like my memories were being polished, pored over. Each one became clear, clean, interesting.”

Anna is distraught about the loss of her alternative self, whom she relied on for companionship; uploads, in addition to being storage, also serve as de facto friends. But she consents, and the upload disappears into the world, taking on the name Aviva.

The story unfolds through four points of view. After Anna, we meet a professor named Cathy who specializes in the “transhumanities” and upload personhood, and who has ingested a biomechanical chip in hopes of communicating with an emancipated upload. “It didn’t look too much like freedom to me, this new state of being: conventional uploads could vote on behalf of their human counterparts, but they couldn’t vote once they left their tethers…. We didn’t so much set them free as snip their tethers and let them float free like balloons loosed into tree branches.” Some scholars were talking about “fleshism” — what they considered the false idea that beings only had worth if they were encased in human flesh.

After Cathy, the first-person narrative flows seamlessly to Samantha, who had been the best friend of Anna’s son. Samantha and Alex were children when they’d met, two years apart in age and so close emotionally that “they rhymed.” The two were making a horror movie together when Alex died. Now Samantha keeps going back to the cliff where Alex either fell or jumped to his death, trying to figure out what happened, while she processes her own loneliness and grief.

Finally, we get to the perspective of Anna’s upload, Aviva, who, despite not having a physical body, feels pain when she disconnects from her human, not having neurochemicals that can rush in to numb it. Pain, she says, is “blinding, indescribable. It runs in all directions. I am made of this pain, I realize, and so is everything. … God made borders; he made solitude and alienation and loneliness and all the small cherished lockets we stuff our feelings inside just so we can hear something rattle when we shake them.”

It is in Aviva’s musings that Greene’s writing and imagination really take off. Thinking she might be dying, Aviva says, “I don’t even get to watch my life flash before me. What I get is a spilled bag of someone else’s memories, which float around me now, glinting in the cold way of all stolen things.”

All these beings are intertwined in ways we will not fully understand until the story’s end, when their connection, and the truth of Alex’s death, becomes fully realized. Along the way, Greene invites the reader to consider the future that might lie ahead of us, perhaps not the exact world that he has imagined here, but something similar. It hints at where we could go wrong, like when one of the personhood scholars writes a paper suggesting uploads would need to “create their own language, possibly out of range of human understanding, to communicate the privacy of their subjective experience.”

That’s exactly what we need, right? A world full of invisible sentient beings communicating with each other in a language that humans can’t understand?

Greene, whose first book, Once More We Saw Stars, was a memoir about the loss of a child, knows first-hand the terrible landscape of grief he navigates here, and his writing is compelling, even though at times, the voice that comes through these four female characters feels a bit masculine.

And some of the technology that is presented here as commonplace takes a suspension of disbelief for sure — but then again, so does most of the Mission: Impossible series. UnWorld is a cautionary tale in an age of artificial intelligence, while also a reminder of what it means to be human in that world. B+

Featured Photo: UnWorld by Jayson Greene.

In 2011, one of the most destructive tornadoes to hit the U.S. touched down at 5:34 p.m. in Joplin, Missouri. Although the area had been under a tornado watch for more than four hours and tornado warnings were issued shortly after 5 o’clock, 161 people died and more than a thousand were injured.

In the aftermath, researchers wanted to learn not only all they could about the tornado’s formation, but also why, with ample warning time, there were so many casualties. Among others, they interviewed a man who “was aware that storms were likely, but wanted to get something to eat,” writes Thomas E. Weber in Cloud Warriors, his examination of the past and future of weather forecasting. The man — who was turned away by one restaurant but found another that let him in and served him with the storm bearing down — was lucky to survive despite his “optimism bias,” the idea that when bad things happen, they likely won’t happen to you.

Optimism bias is but one of the challenges of the people who try to keep us safe from tornados, hurricanes, flooding and other catastrophic weather. Weber calls them “cloud warriors,” people whose job is ostensibly to forecast the weather but who have a larger purpose: keeping us safe from Mother Nature.

“Weather predictions are impressively good, so much so that their accuracy may surprise you.” Weber writes, noting that today’s five-day forecasts are as good as a 24-hour forecast was in 1980. While everything from artificial intelligence to the weather balloons that the National Weather Service launches every day (in every state) will continue to improve forecasting, forecasts have limited value if people don’t heed them, which is why Weber, a journalist, wants everyone to improve their weather literacy, especially about four types of weather-related threats: tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat and hurricanes.

For the tornado chapter, he travels to Norman, Oklahoma, home to the National Weather Center, which, in addition to being populated by very intense and learned meteorologists, pays homage to the Twister movies with its Flying Cow Cafe. Like the stars of those films, Weber goes storm chasing in a tricked-out truck but doesn’t encounter anything more exciting than an ominous wall cloud (a sign of potential tornado formation) and some aggressive hail. (We do learn, however, that the Twister movies didn’t exaggerate the storm chasers on the plains of Oklahoma — a dozen or so companies will take tourists’ money in exchange for putting them in harm’s way.)

Fire isn’t weather, but is driven by wind, which is why Weber travels to an emergency operations center in San Diego to look into how meteorologists and firefighters try to keep people safe from fires that burn at up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and spread at six miles an hour. In this chapter, he examines the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of Paradise, California, in 2018, explains the infamous Santa Ana winds, and delves into why so much of the country is indifferent to the danger of wildlife. He quotes one meteorologist who says: “They don’t comprehend what happens when you have low humidity and wind on a fire. Or when you have a drought or a normal dry summer, what that does to vegetation. They know what it’s like to be thirsty, but they don’t understand what it’s like for vegetation to be thirsty.”

Those of us who pay even fleeting attention to meteorologists like Dave Epstein on social media are familiar with the “European models” that compete with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Strangely enough, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is best-known for its hurricane models, even though hurricanes are rare in the 23 nations and 12 “cooperating states” that it serves.

To learn more, Weber takes us to the town of Reading, England, where the ECMWF’s supercomputers sit; they can, he tells us, conduct more than four quadrillion calculations per second. And yet, “They’re just rows of big metal cabinets; they look like a bunch of refrigerators placed side by side.”

While many of the questions that Webster poses are really interesting — for example, how do you get emergency weather notifications to the Amish, who shun technology — the book often lacks electricity, it moves sluggishly, bogged down by an unfortunate impulse embedded in every journalist’s DNA: to include every last piece of information you gathered in telling a story.

Therefore, when we learn about why accurate weather forecasting is so important to the people launching delivery drones at Walmart, we are tempted to put the book down and go to the Walmart website and try to order by drone, which is much more exciting. In other words, Weber tells us interesting stories, but not always in the most interesting way. This is not necessarily his fault. He is, after all, interviewing the geekiest of weather geeks and is one himself, being one of your fellow Americans who have their own personal weather station installed in their backyard so they can, among other things, get a phone notification if it starts to rain.

Me, I’m still astounded that the weather app on my phone can announce that it will start to rain in 14 minutes and will rain for 24 minutes, and pretty much be right. Weber tries to explain how that happens, and frankly I still don’t fully get it after 200-plus pages. I’m not fully convinced that I need to be as weather literate as Weber and his sources, so long as my iPhone is. Cloud Warriors, though well-reported, may be a deeper dive into the subject than most readers want or need. B

Featured Photo: Cloud Warriors, by Thomas E. Weber

Class Clown, by Dave Barry (Simon & Schuster, 244 pages)

One thing that has been lost with the decline of newspapers is the syndicated humor columnist that most everyone knew of and read. For three decades, one of those was Dave Barry, whose home base was, and still is, the Miami Herald.

For many people, reading Barry’s “year in review” columns was a December tradition. He’s still writing them; it’s just that with paywalls and such, they seem harder to come by. (“Some readers look forward to it; others view it as an opportunity to inform me that I used to be funnier,” Barry says of the column now.)

At 77, somehow still possessed of a twenty-something head of hair, Barry has written a memoir to add to his oeuvre, which is populated with titles like Dave Barry Turns 40, Dave Barry Turns 50 and I’ll Mature When I’m Dead. It’s hard to imagine that there are any stories he hasn’t told, and sure enough, many make encores here. (Stop him if you already know he’s been in a rock band with Stephen King, but he’ll probably keep going.)

As someone who was reading Barry in the 1980s, when he was new to the Herald and newspapers were still a big deal, I feared this new book would feel overly familiar, like so much tired schtick turned out by long-in-the-tooth authors unwilling to hang up the typewriter. But he surprised me.

Not that there isn’t a certain predictability about Barry’s style and delivery; the surprise was in what he was willing to reveal when he wasn’t working to be funny.

He wallops us in the beginning with a story that promises to be boring — the title is simply “Mom and Dad” and he begins it, “Like so many members of the Baby Boom generation, I started out as a baby.”

Barry recounts his formative years in affluent Armonk, New York, where his own sense of humor was cultivated with decidedly quirky parents. Just when we think this is an idyllic story of shiny happy people having more fun than us, Barry reveals the problems his parents struggled with as they grew older. Juxtaposed with the wholesome upbringing the Barry children were given, the end of the parents’ stories is jarring and deeply poignant, reminiscent of some of the darker family stories told by the humorist David Sedaris. It’s unexpected, and reminds us that so often there is sadness behind the veil that funny people have to try to overcome.

After high school, he studied English at a (then) all-male college founded by Quakers, Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he says he “read roughly a third of the way through many great literary works.” (When he later escaped the draft during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector, he says that Society of Friends connection may have benefited his case.) It was at Haverford where he was first published, assigned to write an article about the opening of a Nixon for President office. “As a long-haired, pot-smoking hippie,” he had no interest in the subject and submitted a humor column, which may or may not have been published (he doesn’t remember).

Not knowing what else to do with an English degree, he flirted with straight-up journalism, even working as an intern with Congressional Quarterly, got hired as a reporter for a daily newspaper, and went on to work for the Associated Press, all the while writing humor columns when he could. Unhappy with the constraints of the AP, he quit that job to work at one of the most humorless writing jobs out there: that of a business-writing consultant, but he continued to work as a freelancer, and when a humorous piece he wrote on natural childbirth, focusing on the birth of his son, ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer, his humor writing career really took off. Barry no longer had to pitch his columns; editors were asking him to write for them.

Barry sails through the rest of his career with stories studded with famous people and irate readers and snippets of his columns and articles. There have been so many that unless you’re a 30-year subscriber to theHerald, many are fresh and riotously funny, despite their age. There is, for example, an excerpt of an “interview” Barry did with then Florida Gov. Bob Graham, in which the governor, as Barry puts it, “flipped a switch and went into Zany Mode,” and the two bantered as if they were on a late-night show.
“Barry: What can the state do about harmonica safety? I don’t know if you have any idea how many Floridians die every year in harmonica accidents….

Graham: Well last year we actually made some substantial improvement. In 1981, there were four people who died of harmonica accidents. Now actually, I think it’s only fair to count three of them, because the fourth one was actually, I would say it was more of a swimming pool accident.”

It goes on, gloriously, and it makes you long for the day — of what, I’m not sure. Newspapers? Politicians taking themselves less seriously? There is something in Barry’s career that hasn’t been replaced by a newcomer, let’s just say. The same when we lost Erma Bombeck, Lewis Grizzard, Art Buchwald and so many others.

Barry subtitles this book “the memoirs of a professional wiseass,” drawing on his mission in high school, which he says was wiseassery. He had a friend with whom he basically pranked his way through school without serious consequence. He recalls life events with the nostalgia of the Boomer he is, and sometimes he almost seems Forrest Gump-like as he romps his way through historic events, growing ever more famous, writing screenplays and novels, and even winning a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Class Clown is unlikely to win any elite literary prizes, but Barry proves that on the cusp of 80 he can still make America laugh. B

Featured Photo: Class Clown by Dave Barry

Quirky isn’t usually my thing, and Annie Hartnett’s latest novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is most decidedly quirky (just ask Pancakes, the death-predicting cat). The events are bizarre and often tragic, and the characters are eccentric. But at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.

The story starts with a slew of those bizarre events that ultimately unite main character PJ Halliday, a 63-year-old lottery winner with a long history of drinking and letting people down, with his estranged brother’s young grandchildren, Luna and Ollie.

PJ is not about to let their sudden existence in his life stop him from his latest endeavor, a road trip from his home in Massachusetts to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, where he plans to woo his high-school crush, recently single again after losing her spouse. (PJ learns about that in the newspaper obits, not because he’s been in contact with her, so this visit will be a fun surprise for her.)

Also joining the trip, begrudgingly, is PJ’s 20-something daughter, Sophie, who is simmering with decades’ worth of anger toward her often absent alcoholic father. She has been tasked by her mother — PJ’s ex-wife, Ivy — to take care of him while she is away in Alaska with her fiance, Fred. So Sophie feels obligated to act as babysitter, for Ollie and Luna, and also for her dad.

The motley road-trip crew is rounded out by Pancakes, who has recently wandered into PJ’s life after a stint as a therapy cat at a nursing home.

If PJ were written in any other way, I think I would have hated him as a character. But somehow Hartnett makes me want to root for him. He, pitifully, thinks of Ivy and Fred as his best friends. He goes to their house for breakfast every morning, and he’s devastated when they don’t invite him on their trip.

When Ivy and Fred leave, PJ decides to quit drinking, again.

“PJ had never had a detox as bad as that one, not even when he had to go to prison for six weeks for the drunk driving, but once the detoxing was over, PJ had a new outlook. … When Ivy and Fred got home in September, he could be a new man. He wanted to be a man who was worthy of being their best man. Without the booze, PJ started feeling hopeful.”

It’s kind of hard not to feel for an old man who is so lonely and accepting of his own faults that he settles for being the third wheel in his ex-wife’s relationship. He’s lived his fair share of tragic events, too, which we start to learn more about as the road trip gets underway.

But for every moment or memory of darkness, there is also light, in the form of sweet moments between characters, hope for better things to come and the perfect amount of well-placed fatalistic humor.

Take, for instance, when Pancakes jumps out of a window of the moving car as Sophie and the kids try to track down a missing PJ. Ollie comments that Pancakes is “suicidal without Uncle PJ.” In fact, Pancakes is pulling a Lassie, leading the crew to PJ, who had been hit by a car while walking back to the motel from a bar after having just one drink and deciding he needed to go back to his family. The car was driven, ironically, by the man he’d been chatting with in the bar whose sad story was that he’d killed his wife when driving drunk. PJ survives the accident with minor injuries, but the man does not.

Emotions run high throughout the trip, as PJ battles his own inner demons, Sophie grapples with her dad’s still-not-great behavior and the kids adjust to their new reality as orphans — although Luna is having none of that. She is convinced her real dad is a famous actor who used to live in their town and whom her mom had always said she’d briefly dated. Luna wants to track him down and make him take a paternity test. This would get PJ off the hook as guardian, so he agrees to veer off course for Luna’s heartbreaking endeavor to find a family.

It’s all very sad, but also funny and genuine. The story could have been depressing, but it’s not. The characters are all well-developed and unique, and PJ’s growth feels honest and real. He’s somehow a loveable underdog, despite his constant lapses in judgment.

The Tender Hearts the title is referring to, presumably, is Tender Hearts Retirement Community, as they are literally on the road driving to that destination. But The Road to Tender Hearts could also describe the path PJ is taking to rebuild his heart with compassion and empathy. It could be the softening of Sophie’s heart as she sees her dad trying to be better and do better. It could be the unwitting journey PJ is taking into Ollie and Luna’s tender hearts.

I’m glad I didn’t let my thoughts of “this is so weird” as I read the first few pages stop me from taking this journey with them. A-

Featured Photo: The Ghost Lab by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Quirky isn’t usually my thing, and Annie Hartnett’s latest novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is most decidedly quirky (just ask Pancakes, the death-predicting cat). The events are bizarre and often tragic, and the characters are eccentric. But at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.

The story starts with a slew of those bizarre events that ultimately unite main character PJ Halliday, a 63-year-old lottery winner with a long history of drinking and letting people down, with his estranged brother’s young grandchildren, Luna and Ollie.

PJ is not about to let their sudden existence in his life stop him from his latest endeavor, a road trip from his home in Massachusetts to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, where he plans to woo his high-school crush, recently single again after losing her spouse. (PJ learns about that in the newspaper obits, not because he’s been in contact with her, so this visit will be a fun surprise for her.)

Also joining the trip, begrudgingly, is PJ’s 20-something daughter, Sophie, who is simmering with decades’ worth of anger toward her often absent alcoholic father. She has been tasked by her mother — PJ’s ex-wife, Ivy — to take care of him while she is away in Alaska with her fiance, Fred. So Sophie feels obligated to act as babysitter, for Ollie and Luna, and also for her dad.

The motley road-trip crew is rounded out by Pancakes, who has recently wandered into PJ’s life after a stint as a therapy cat at a nursing home.

If PJ were written in any other way, I think I would have hated him as a character. But somehow Hartnett makes me want to root for him. He, pitifully, thinks of Ivy and Fred as his best friends. He goes to their house for breakfast every morning, and he’s devastated when they don’t invite him on their trip.

When Ivy and Fred leave, PJ decides to quit drinking, again.

“PJ had never had a detox as bad as that one, not even when he had to go to prison for six weeks for the drunk driving, but once the detoxing was over, PJ had a new outlook. … When Ivy and Fred got home in September, he could be a new man. He wanted to be a man who was worthy of being their best man. Without the booze, PJ started feeling hopeful.”

It’s kind of hard not to feel for an old man who is so lonely and accepting of his own faults that he settles for being the third wheel in his ex-wife’s relationship. He’s lived his fair share of tragic events, too, which we start to learn more about as the road trip gets underway.

But for every moment or memory of darkness, there is also light, in the form of sweet moments between characters, hope for better things to come and the perfect amount of well-placed fatalistic humor.

Take, for instance, when Pancakes jumps out of a window of the moving car as Sophie and the kids try to track down a missing PJ. Ollie comments that Pancakes is “suicidal without Uncle PJ.” In fact, Pancakes is pulling a Lassie, leading the crew to PJ, who had been hit by a car while walking back to the motel from a bar after having just one drink and deciding he needed to go back to his family. The car was driven, ironically, by the man he’d been chatting with in the bar whose sad story was that he’d killed his wife when driving drunk. PJ survives the accident with minor injuries, but the man does not.

Emotions run high throughout the trip, as PJ battles his own inner demons, Sophie grapples with her dad’s still-not-great behavior and the kids adjust to their new reality as orphans — although Luna is having none of that. She is convinced her real dad is a famous actor who used to live in their town and whom her mom had always said she’d briefly dated. Luna wants to track him down and make him take a paternity test. This would get PJ off the hook as guardian, so he agrees to veer off course for Luna’s heartbreaking endeavor to find a family.

It’s all very sad, but also funny and genuine. The story could have been depressing, but it’s not. The characters are all well-developed and unique, and PJ’s growth feels honest and real. He’s somehow a loveable underdog, despite his constant lapses in judgment.

The Tender Hearts the title is referring to, presumably, is Tender Hearts Retirement Community, as they are literally on the road driving to that destination. But The Road to Tender Hearts could also describe the path PJ is taking to rebuild his heart with compassion and empathy. It could be the softening of Sophie’s heart as she sees her dad trying to be better and do better. It could be the unwitting journey PJ is taking into Ollie and Luna’s tender hearts.

I’m glad I didn’t let my thoughts of “this is so weird” as I read the first few pages stop me from taking this journey with them. A-

Featured Photo: The Road To Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett