This entertaining read from Clare Pooley is centered at a community center that serves the elderly, pregnant women, a daycare center and a veterans group. This is Pooley's 3rd novel after her best selling The Authenticity Project and Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting. "After hiding in her apartment for 15 years, Daphne starts to feel like she doesn’t want to be invisible anymore. On her 70th birthday, she decides that she’ll find a way to step outside for longer than it takes to buy groceries a couple of times a week. It’s time to make friends and, perhaps, find a partner" (Kirkus).She gets dragged into a Senior Citizens Club, which she promptly takes over. During one meeting, part of the ceiling collapses and the town council threatens to shut the place down and sell it, since they "can't afford" to repair it. This will leave several people who Daphne has become attached to in real financial straits and curtail their life choices. Publishers Weekly praises "Pooley's clever and delightfully farcical scenes [that] are laugh-out-loud funny, often thanks to the frank Daphne."
Booklist offers these enticing comments: Pooley creates "an unlikely cohort--failed actor/recovering kleptomaniac Art; Ruby, who stealthily knits Banksy-style art installations; Anna, a former long-haul trucker who now rocks a motorized mobility scooter; and Ziggy, a teenage father with a daughter at the daycare, whose mad tech skills endear him to the otherwise prickly Daphne. Throw in a madcap bus ride, a mangy dog, and an audition for a reality TV show, and the result is a lovably quirky, reassuringly wise, and memorably inspiring romp that shatters ageist stereotypes. For fans of Fredrik Backman and Rachel Joyce... Readers seek out best-selling and wily comedic novelist Pooley for just the sort of cheeky break from stress they crave." Kirkus closes their review by asserting that "Fans of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series will enjoy this delightful romp that on its surface is about senior citizens—whom everyone tends to discount—and others coming together to save the local community center but really is about so much more: aging, love, crime, friendship, making mistakes and living through them, and life’s complicated emotions and choices. A frothy, fun, and well-paced cozy mystery—in which no murders take place."
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