The Third Act of Theo Gruene - Talya Tate Boerner - ★★.¼

AUTHOR: Talya Tate Boerner

GENRE: Contemporary Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: May 20, 2025

RATING: 2.3 stars.

In a Nutshell: A contemporary fiction about an old man and a little girl thrown together by circumstances. Good characters but the girl is overly precocious and somewhat annoying. Okayish found-family vibes but the ending is too convenient. Decent plot but way too preachy on a multitude of unrelated topics. Too much telling rather than showing. A heartwarming option for those unbothered by the above-mentioned issues. Content warning: Covid pandemic and lockdown used actively in the plot.

Plot Preview:

Arkansas. 2020. Seventy-year-old Theo is a retired botanist who spends his days preserving plant specimens for university research. Living alone after his wife died several years ago, Theo appreciates his solitude and his fixed routine. So when a precocious eight-year-old named Penelope comes barging into his life to escape from the rain outside, Theo is taken aback. He assumes that that their initial interaction would be a one-time thing so he does help her. But Penelope has no intention of leaving Theo alone. As her mother Ivy is a single mom struggling to raise her daughter alone, Theo finds himself cornered into agreeing to watch Penelope during the day. Little do they know that a life-changing pandemic is soon going to hit their town.

The story comes to us in Theo’s third-person perspective.

Bookish Yays:

🥳 Theo. The best character of the book by far. Mostly sensible, except when he was being taken for a ride by the other two main characters.

🥳 Some funny and touching moments, often thanks to the banter between Theo and Penelope.

🥳 The nod to one of my favourite books, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, and the use of Penelope’s “Boo Radley holes” in the plot.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🤔 The senior-citizen-young-child combo is slowly becoming popular in contemporary works, and more often than not, the geriatric is shown as a grump with the child converting them towards sweetness. Not so in this book. Theo isn't a curmudgeon. (At least I didn’t feel so. I am surprised to see many reviews calling him cantankerous.) While I welcome this refreshing take, it also makes the proceedings a little boring. There is almost immediate acceptance from Theo and Penelope of each other’s presence, so there’s nothing to create sparks in the plot.

🤔 The start doesn’t mention the timeline. I just assumed it was present day, when the sudden mention of a ‘new virus’ corrected my assumption. To be fair, the blurb mentions the pandemic, but I totally forgot about it and was hence caught by surprise. Covid isn’t a trigger for me in general, but its portrayal in this book made me recollect the anguish of online schooling, the dread of social distancing, the fear of learning about deaths and the disquietude of the spiralling numbers. So yeah, realistically written, but a bit too realistic for my comfort.

Bookish Nays:

😒 I don't know if I'm the only one with such thoughts, so this might just be personal preference. But I'm a bit tired of precocious children in fiction. It has become a convenient way of pushing advanced thoughts and observations through child characters. In this book specifically, Penelope is precocious not just about 1-2 topics but about almost every single topic known to humankind. Politics, environment, dietetics, LGBT rights, history, geography… there’s no subject beyond her purview. Her opinions contain not just advanced vocabulary but also advanced observations on these topics. It is too heavyhanded an approach. Sometimes I wish fiction would stick to perfectly ordinary children - does a child character need to be so gifted in order for us to love them?

😒 Further, Penelope is often manipulative and lies blatantly to get her way, but this is brushed aside indulgently by almost every adult. This is probably the first time I found a child character more annoying than endearing. (I did like her, but only in some scenes.)

😒 Penelope’s mother Ivy starts off as a good character, but her later behaviour comes across as too entitled. Again, whatever negative she does is forgiven easily. Not a fan of such writing or such characters. Accountability is important even in uplit.

😒 Lot of telling in the writing not just in terms of what happens but also in offering an interpretation of what we should understand from something hinted/said. I don’t like being a passive reader, and this book didn’t allow me a single chance to read actively by being so in-your-face about everything. The worst was how it kept yapping on about Penelope’s smartness. We get it: She’s smart! Move on!

😒 The found family trope. Often works well, but in this book, poor Theo is barely given any choice in the matter and he doesn’t even realise it. A ‘found family’ storyline has to feel heartwarming, but this one feels mostly exploitative of Theo.

😒 The final quarter is way too dragged and overly convenient. One reveal is just too farfetched to be convincing.

😒 There are only three characters active for a major chunk of the book: Theo, Penelope, and Ivy. All the others are only mentioned, and there are barely a handful of scenes where a fourth character appears briefly. It seems like too sequestered a world for a believable story, even accounting for covid lockdowns.

😒 Too much of preachiness (mostly coming from Penelope, which makes it even more implausible and exasperating.) Pontificating on a couple of topics would have still been okay, but we get inputs not just on racial discrimination and “book banning by radicals” but also about the thread count of sheets and the importance of antioxidants. You might think these are good points, but the writing in these scenes doesn't flow smoothly as the topics feel shoved in. All such conversations hence sound awkward.

Overall, it’s not like the book is bad. The basic plot and Theo helped me enjoy a part of it. But I am fussy about writing styles and plot choices, and when a book indulges in so much telling and didacticism, I automatically zone out. (Probably the reason I cannot read self-help books without falling asleep!) Perhaps other readers who focus only on the emotions will not feel the same because the story does evoke the right sentiments.

After seeing the lengthy list of topics covered, I began wondering if this was a debut work, but to my surprise, it is not! The other books by this author seem highly rated, just like this one also is. (It currently has an astounding 4.65 rating on GR!) So mine is very much an outlier opinion. Please read other reviews and take a more informed call on the book.

Recommended only to those who enjoy moralistic novels, and are okay with the “telling” style of writing, overly precocious kids and the inclusion of the pandemic.

2.3 stars. (3 stars for the plot, 2.5 stars for the characters, 1.5 stars for the writing style. Averaged.)

My thanks to IBPA and One Mississippi Press LLC for providing the DRC of “The Third Act of Theo Gruene” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.