This is another book I picked from the library on a whim that completely blew my socks off. As you know, I love books about older people doing things we don’t expect them to do (based on stereotypes). I also thoroughly enjoy books that include truly genuine inter-generational friendships. And I like fast-paced stories with lots happening, great character development and a great sense of humour. This book has it all.
It’s the story of Daphne, a septuagenarian widow who has not had much to do with anyone for over a decade, but is considering trying to make some friends. She’s a smart, ruthlessly organized person, so her new endeavour begins with a white board and a list. She does research and figures out that she needs to join a group of people around her age and start getting to know them. First step: get a mobile phone, because she’s certainly not ready for human-to-human phone calls. She texts the number listed at her local community centre for a social group of people over 70, and before she knows it she has become embroiled in the lives of every member of said group – and a few extras.
What follows is a fast-paced story that covers every kind of dramatic event, including an affair, a drug deal gone wrong, and trying to save the community centre via a TV dog and owner competition with a large cash prize. As her past threatens to catch up to her, Daphne rushes to try and complete her ever-growing whiteboard list of tasks, mostly things she needs to do to help her new friends.
I loved every moment of time I spent with this spunky and entertaining cast of characters. I loved seeing them develop, watching their lives be altered, and finding out how their relationships would play out. Every single character in this book is loveably flawed, every one of them has a fascinating story, and none of them are boring – even if they seemed like it at the start. The best part was seeing them each surpass their own expectations of themselves, and going outside their comfort zone to help one another.
The icing on the cake was the note written by the author at the end of the book saying that as she is watching her parents in their 80s and approaching more mature years herself, she’s tired of seeing older people only represented in books as figures of pathos, without personalities, pasts or futures. She said she wanted to see older people as they really are – and that anyone who has reached that stage in life will have picked up some bad habits and stories along the way, which is very true. I think sometimes we forget that all the rebels, ball-breakers, and outsiders will also have to grow old at some point, but that doesn’t change who they are or have been. It made the book even better to know that she had written it exactly to redress this inaccurate portrayal of the elderly and give them colour and style.
I’d definitely recommend this book – it’s got adventure, great characters, intergenerational friendships and lots of blown up stereotypes. It’s a lot of fun to read, but also heartwarmingly real and complex. Not a single thing I’d change, and I know I’ll be coming back to this one again in the future.
A senior citizens’ center and a daycare collide with hilarious results in the new ensemble comedy from New York Times- bestselling author Clare Pooley
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. – Goodreads
Book Title: How to Age Disgracefully
Author: Clare Pooley
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook (Libby)
Published By: Pamela Dorman Books
Released: June 11, 2024
Genre: Fiction, Septuagenarians, Community, Adventure, Yarn-Bombing and other Hijinks
Pages: 352
Date Read: January 15-17, 2025
Rating: 9/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.19/5 (22,204 ratings)