Perhaps the one good thing about being cooped up at home in the depths of winter is the extra time we have available for reading. I’ve taken advantage of that in the post-Christmas downtime. But after getting through, and learning a lot from, a couple of heavyweight books – The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seaton and Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey – I was ready for something lighter and more fun.
I found that in The Cabernet Club, a delightful romp through a many-faceted life transition by the heroine, Debbie Gordon. Though much of it was laugh-out-loud funny –especially a horror-show of a date with a friend of a friend…hard to believe guys actually behave that way on dates – the book also teaches some life lessons.
Maybe better, it just reiterates those lessons. We all know that it’s never too late to start over. We all know that things are seldom what they seem. We all know that someone’s apparently perfect life can really be a miserable slog. And we all know that “experts” usually don’t know “their ass from their eyebrows,” as Debbie memorably puts it in resolving one of the book’s conflicts. Still, it’s nice to have those lessons repeated as we watch Debbie re-learn them for herself.
Debbie is a long-divorced empty nester who leaves her New England home for six-month trial residency in Florida. If things don’t work out for her, she can always go back north and live in Delaware with her mother hen of a grown daughter. That’s an undesirable fallback Plan B, mostly because it will mean duty as an unpaid nana.
She rents a place in a rather sketchy, over-55 enclave called Palmetto Pointe. The cast of characters she meets there would be right at home in Schitt’s Creek. But fortunately for Debbie, she befriends Maria and Fran. Like Debbie, their drink of choice is Cabernet Sauvignon, hence the name of their exclusive little club. The three of them bond and work their way through a series of adventures that include dates and men, lousy but necessary jobs, small-town politics, health scares and incompetent doctors, and the re-visiting of a long-ago family tragedy when someone else from the old town arrives.
Navigating those adventures along with those ladies was fun for me. I think it will be fun and even somewhat familiar for women and men of their – and my – age group. In our own ways, we’ve been to some of those places. It also brought home the book’s greatest lesson: the critical importance of good friends who are there with us in good times and bad.
Speaking just for myself, I also felt a twinge of envy at that last lesson. And not for the first time, as I’ve frequently expressed to my lady friends over our own glasses of Cabernet. Women just have a knack of forming and keeping friendships like these. That’s one of the reasons that women outlive men, who have a much tougher time building and nurturing such support structures late in their lives.
The co-authors are Rona Zable and her daughter Margie Zable Fisher. Rona had published three Young Adult novels during her career, and she had drafted this novel before she passed away in 2023. Margie re-worked and augmented the draft and saw it through to publication.
If they ever turn this book into a TV series, I think it would be a mashup of Golden Girls and Gilmore Girls. And as noted above, there would be a touch of Schitt’s Creek there too – “Florida Man” probably has a place in Palmetto Pointe. I thought of Gilmore Girls because of the dynamic between an adult daughter trying to make her way in the world and her loving but tut-tuttingly disapproving parents. The situation is similar here but reversed, as the mother is plunging ahead with something new while the daughter hovers in the near background, ready to say “I told you so.”
Does the daughter ever get to say it? You can probably guess the answer, but I’m not going to spoil it for you. Read the book to find out.
Tags: autobiographical fiction, book-review, Books, fiction, Florida, mature dating, mothers and daughters, reading, retire to Florida, starting over, writing
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