How to Age Disgracefully - Clare Pooley - ★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Clare Pooley

GENRE: Uplit Fiction.

PUBLICATION DATE: June 11, 2024

RATING: 3.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: A contemporary fiction filled with many quirky characters and some entertaining moments. Geriatrics, toddlers, and a dog make for a fun combo. However, quite over the top and fairly predictable in execution. Enjoyable if you don’t overthink it. This is a slightly outlier review.

Plot Preview:

Fifty-something Lydia has just opted for the job of running the Senior Citizen Social Club at the local community centre. She has devised a good plan of quiet afternoons together, knitting and playing card games and sipping tea. Unfortunately for her, the senior citizens in the club have a very different idea of what a ‘club’ should do.

When the council decides to sell off the shabby community centre for a new luxury complex, the senior citizens club partners with their neighbours – the daycare centre and its little members – to save the building. Joining them on this valiant quest is a teenaged father of one of the daycare babies and an old dog who is still learning new tricks.

The story comes to us in the third-person perspective of four characters – Lydia, seventy-five-year-old Art (a failed actor who has a new agenda for making money), seventy-year-old Daphne (a recluse who has suddenly decided to reenter the world in her domineering way), and Ziggy (baby Kylie’s teen dad who yearns for his free days but also loves his little one.)

Ever since Fredrik Backman’s ‘A Man Called Ove’ came out, a new genre has started, having a curmudgeonly senior citizen in the lead whose heart turns around over the course of the story, thanks to the good-hearted people who don’t leave them alone. Then when Richard Osman’s ‘The Thursday Night Murder Club’ was published, a new subcategory started: senior citizens in a group/club working together for some common goal. The concept was innovative once, but is getting repetitive now. I still like reading novels with senior citizens. (In fact, I’d rather read these than books with self-centred YA protagonists). But I wish the storylines wouldn’t blend so much into each other.

Bookish Yays:

🥳 The choice of writing the story from four distinct POVs, each of whom has nothing in common with the others. Might not work for those who don’t enjoy multi-character perspectives, but I relished the journey.

🥳 The distinctness of each character’s backstory and their present conundrums adds good drama to an otherwise saccharine plot. Every character has some learning and growing to do, even if they are old.

🥳 The young kiddos in the story, especially baby Kylie – adding the perfect touch of cherubic cuteness to a plot dominated by the golden oldies.

🥳 Margaret Thatcher the dog, adding some canine pizzazz to the proceedings. Wish there had been more of her.

🥳 I LOVE that the story has a teenaged boy shown as a single parent! It is so typical to see fictional teen girls have babies and struggle with raising them alone while the guy who impregnated them vanishes from the scene. Ziggy’s story is a refreshing one thanks to the role reversal. I also like how he wasn’t shown as the perfect parent just because he was in an active parenting role.

🥳 The praiseworthy stance against ageist stereotypes, and against how senior citizens are always shown as either boring or ignorant or ready to give up on life. (Of course, this feedback is true for most books that have geriatric main characters.)

🥳 Some truly funny scenes and pranks and banter. This is British humour, so it is at a very different level. You either love it or you don’t. I enjoyed the wittiness more often than not.

🥳 The author's note – interesting and heartfelt.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🤔 While the prologue is interesting, I am never a fan of prologues that simply rehash a scene from the later part of the book. Moreover, thanks to the details provided, the target of the scene in question is already clear to readers. It spoils the fun of discovery. Also, this track doesn’t get closed properly.

🤔 The geriatric characters - Not typical seniors, they are flawed and funny. But of the members of the club, we get to see only Art and Daphne in detail. Anna and Ruby deserved more page time, but they were mostly included only for comic effect. I connected with Lydia the most, though our situations and ages are very different. Her inferiority complex comes out well in the first half.

🤔 How is it possible for a book filled with so many adults to have only one normal main character – that too, a high-schooler!?!? With 5-6 senior citizens in the club, at least a couple of them could have been shown as regular old people, but the only relatable senior characters are in secondary roles. The main cast has an overdose of ‘eccentric’, which is fun but also gets boring after a while.

🤔 Though the running track is that of a community centre being threatened of closure by the local council, there is no overarching plot as such. Each character has their individual struggles and the story works through each of them in parallel. Every subplot had scenes I liked and scenes that annoyed me.

🤔 The pacing is quite slow, especially considering the genre. A part of it could be explained by the character-driven narration, but combined with the lack of a strong plot and the fairly predictable storyline, the result was that I zoned out many times and still missed nothing.

🤔 The first half still had enough to keep me going, but the second half was way over the top. Everything appeared too contrived and convenient.

Bookish Nays:

😒 Personal preference, but I am really bored of the ‘grumpy geriatric’ trope. Daphne is a great character, but after a point, it became tiresome to see her sneering and grumbling her way through every scene without disgruntling anyone. Why should bullying be condoned in senior citizens?

😒 Another trope I am tired of is the ‘interfering geriatric’, à la Mabel Beaumont and Vera Wong, where the senior character happily pokes her way through everyone’s business and no one has any issues with it. (Or rather, they can’t do anything even if they have issues with it.) And of course, the nose-poking always saves the day.

😒 There are two sorta-antagonists in the plot, and both are described & judged by the “flaws” in their physical appearance. Not cool.

All in all, this isn't a bad book, and I can even see why it has garnered such strong positive feedback from many readers. But I didn’t find myself ‘enjoying’ the book as much as I had expected to. I did like it enough, but not to the extent most other readers seemed to have. OTT situations rarely work for me, so this might be more of a ME problem than a BOOK problem.

Recommended to those who enjoy stories with whimsical old characters and hyperbolic situations. The combination of old and young and canine ought to work well if you are looking for something not taxing. This is a heart-book and not a head-book, but as you can see, my head refused to switch off.

My thanks to Penguin Group Viking and Pamela Dorman Books for providing the DRC of “How to Age Disgracefully” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.