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Paperback Details
  • 08/2021
  • 9781734499506
  • 240 pages
  • $16.95
Messing with Men
Retirees on a Florida island try to save an historic house, settle old scores, and pleasure new lovers but risk unearthing long-buried secrets in the bargain.
Reviews
This sweet and mournful story follows ageing residents in a Florida resort town as they fall in and out of love and lust with each other, dabble in local causes, and try to make sense of their lives. Ali, Landon, and Sam meet regularly at a local bar to reflect on their careers and sex lives. Along the way, lifelong bachelor Landon starts a new love affair and comes to terms with a long-ago relationship with a student, while everyone in the crew has an angle on a historic Victorian-style home slated for a controversial demolition. But despite a dozen threads, the real plot is the characters' attempts to achieve some inner peace in the final chapters of their lives.

Brookhouse elegantly portrays his characters' mating rituals, still uncertain although they're in their middle years. Landon and his tentative girlfriend Hannah go to a clothing optional beach and exchange coy words: "Is this going to be awkward? she asks. I mean, you have a choice…How much I want to see or how much I want to show?" But Hannah also muses about widows who "tolerate sex to make the loneliness to go away." Still, some literary conceits—a near-total use of the present tense and omission of all quotation marks—at times make keeping up a challenge.

The characters, too, aren’t always caught up in the plot, so lost in their thoughts that what happens in their here and now can seem to them secondary. Landon and Sam secretly bury a skeleton on an old estate in an ill-conceived attempt to save it, but that barely seems to make an impression on them. However, when Landon sees a mural that may save the house anyway, he becomes lost in the "leafy tongues and sinewy vines and the floral qualities in the figures.” In the end everyone is back in the bar, perhaps, like the reader, a little wiser for their reveries and misadventures.

Takeaway: These wryly reflective Floridian retirees, with their longings and regrets, will remain with readers.

Great for fans of: William Trevor’s The Old Boys, Deborah Moggach’s These Foolish Things.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B+
Marketing copy: A-

Formats
Paperback Details
  • 08/2021
  • 9781734499506
  • 240 pages
  • $16.95
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