PALM MERIDIAN, Grace Flahive's satisfying lesbian-love in retirement set in 2067

PALM MERIDIAN
GRACE FLAHIVE
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A rollicking, big-hearted story of long-lost love, friendship, and a life well-lived, set at a Florida retirement resort for queer women, on the last day of resident Hannah Cardin’s life—for readers of Less and The Wedding People.

It’s 2067 and Florida is partially underwater, but even that can’t bring down the residents of Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, a utopian home for queer women who want to revel in their twilight years. Inside, Hula-Hoopers shimmy across the grass, fiercely competitive book clubs nearly come to blows, and the roller-ski team races up and down the winding paths. Everywhere you look, these women are living large.

Hannah Cardin has spent ten happy years under these tropical, technicolor skies, but after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, she has decided that tomorrow morning she will close her eyes for the very last time. Tonight, however, Hannah and her raucous band of friends are throwing one hell of an end-of-life party. And with less than twenty-four hours left, Hannah is holding out for one final, impossible thing…

Amongst the guest list is Sophie, the love of Hannah’s life. They haven’t spoken since their devastating breakup over forty years ago, but today, Hannah is hoping for the chance to give her greatest love one last try.

As Hannah anxiously awaits Sophie’s arrival, her mind casts back over the highs and lows of her kaleidoscopic life. But when a shocking secret from the past is revealed, Hannah must reconsider if she can say goodbye after all.

Spanning the course of a single day and seventy-odd years, and bursting with irresistible hope, humor, and wisdom, this one-of-a-kind novel celebrates the unexpected moments that make us feel the most alive.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The idea that people born in the 1990s will be retiring to (surviving) Florida in 2067 feels...exuberantly optimistic...but I'll go with it. More especially I'm thrilled at the notion of the right to die being well established in this future, and the existence of queer elder spaces is just ordinary, and hell! sign me up!

Of course I'd be well into supercentenarianhood in 2067, the year the book's set, which ya know what, maybe not so much, thanks anyway.

The point of this story is satisfying to me, the way at the end pf life one wants to take stock and to see what can be fixed among the innumerable errors we've made. Sophie, our PoV character's "one that got away," is invited to Hannah's end of life celebration. We see their relationship in flashbacks, which does not add suspense in the usual way...we know the relationship collapses...but does make Hannah's desire to see Sophie again before she chooses to escape the awfulness of her end-stage cancer more impactful.

It's really moving in a quiet, contemplative way. Wrenching losses remembered, not lived through in real time...choices muffed, but long ago...people loved and cherished for an entire lifetime who only know the event we're reading about and the actors in this present resolution as names, or as their survivor selves. It's poignant, it's moving, and I think it's done very well indeed.

It is not a Big! Dramatic! Finish!

I wouldn't've liked the read had it been so. I did very much wish I'd felt the flashbacks into Sophie and Hannah's early relationship in the 2020s had somehow sowed seeds for their world of 2067. I get just how spoiled a readerly reaction that is, yet as it is the flashbacks don't do more than tell me how awful the two people were in their youth. It isn't all that interesting, that point, and the net result is to take more away from the effect of the read than add to it.

I'm not at all trying to discourage you from reading the book. I hope you will because the imperfect future ahead of us is so hopefully presented in Hannah's story. It's got lots of problems, but when has the world not had problems? Have you not yet had enough of doomscrolling?

If so, come to Palm Meridian, settle in, and be told that the world will muddle through, that we will manage somehow to love and care for each other, and make it work as best we can.