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A review by corinnekeener
Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes
5.0
Can you believe that after, I don't know, 45 years I finally won a GoodReads Giveaway? And it was for the first novel by Linda Holmes from NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour? I'm still thrilled about it.
I read Evvie Drake Starts Over on vacation and I'm not going to say that is the only situation in which one should read and enjoy Evvie Drake Starts Over, but I am going to say it deserved the real estate it took up in my luggage.
Evvie Drake is a thirty-ish something living in coastal Maine and about to leave her high school sweetheart doctor husband when he unexpectedly dies in a car accident. Everyone believes that she’s trapped in a cycle of grief, because that’s to be expected, and she doesn’t stop them from thinking this. In an effort to help her pay the bills on the big old Victorian home she’s left with, her very good friend Andy suggests that she rent out an apartment to his very good friend, Dean Tenney. Dean is a professional baseball pitcher, recently forced to retire after the yips destroy his career and looking to lay low for a little while.
The rest of the novel could be mistakenly described as predictable. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Evvie and Dean have a sweet and flirtatious friendship that becomes something more. But Holmes is doing way more here - not that I’d expect anything less. There’s nothing wrong with a straight-up romance, but Holmes has written a romance and a story about many different kinds of grief so thoughtfully. She treads wonderfully comfortable rom-com standards, but doesn’t overlook how complicated people are.
Evvie and Andy are the best representation of friends in a romance ever. Probably. It’s a friendship between a man and a woman that doesn’t get ruined by someone catching feelings. It’s an honest representation of what it means when you and your BFF find yourself in different places in life and how you can navigate learning new lives together. It's hard. It's its own kind of grief. I cried!
This is also the first book I’ve read that accurately captures emotional abuse in a domestic relationship in a way that’s normal. It doesn't resort to more drastic types of abuse to prove that emotional abuse is destructive to your life. Evvie’s relationship with her late husband was familiar to me. I love that her feelings weren’t trivialized and that she wasn’t treated as just a sensitive woman. There are so many people out there dealing with similar situations and I was really blown away to see it treated so complexly. Finally a book that gets that a new dude to love does not fix your baggage, nor does it treat baggage as a flaw.
And to top it off, some of the dialogue was laugh out loud funny. Really, truly, the whole package.
I read Evvie Drake Starts Over on vacation and I'm not going to say that is the only situation in which one should read and enjoy Evvie Drake Starts Over, but I am going to say it deserved the real estate it took up in my luggage.
Evvie Drake is a thirty-ish something living in coastal Maine and about to leave her high school sweetheart doctor husband when he unexpectedly dies in a car accident. Everyone believes that she’s trapped in a cycle of grief, because that’s to be expected, and she doesn’t stop them from thinking this. In an effort to help her pay the bills on the big old Victorian home she’s left with, her very good friend Andy suggests that she rent out an apartment to his very good friend, Dean Tenney. Dean is a professional baseball pitcher, recently forced to retire after the yips destroy his career and looking to lay low for a little while.
The rest of the novel could be mistakenly described as predictable. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Evvie and Dean have a sweet and flirtatious friendship that becomes something more. But Holmes is doing way more here - not that I’d expect anything less. There’s nothing wrong with a straight-up romance, but Holmes has written a romance and a story about many different kinds of grief so thoughtfully. She treads wonderfully comfortable rom-com standards, but doesn’t overlook how complicated people are.
Evvie and Andy are the best representation of friends in a romance ever. Probably. It’s a friendship between a man and a woman that doesn’t get ruined by someone catching feelings. It’s an honest representation of what it means when you and your BFF find yourself in different places in life and how you can navigate learning new lives together. It's hard. It's its own kind of grief. I cried!
This is also the first book I’ve read that accurately captures emotional abuse in a domestic relationship in a way that’s normal. It doesn't resort to more drastic types of abuse to prove that emotional abuse is destructive to your life. Evvie’s relationship with her late husband was familiar to me. I love that her feelings weren’t trivialized and that she wasn’t treated as just a sensitive woman. There are so many people out there dealing with similar situations and I was really blown away to see it treated so complexly. Finally a book that gets that a new dude to love does not fix your baggage, nor does it treat baggage as a flaw.
And to top it off, some of the dialogue was laugh out loud funny. Really, truly, the whole package.