Stacy Alesi's BookBitch.com™

From the host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast comes a heartfelt debut about the unlikely relationship between a young woman who’s lost her husband and a major league pitcher who’s lost his game.

In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside, and Evvie doesn’t correct them.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, former Major League pitcher and Andy’s childhood best friend, is wrestling with what miserable athletes living out their worst nightmares call the “yips”: he can’t throw straight anymore, and, even worse, he can’t figure out why. As the media storm heats up, an invitation from Andy to stay in Maine seems like the perfect chance to hit the reset button on Dean’s future.

When he moves into an apartment at the back of Evvie’s house, the two make a deal: Dean won’t ask about Evvie’s late husband, and Evvie won’t ask about Dean’s baseball career. Rules, though, have a funny way of being broken—and what starts as an unexpected friendship soon turns into something more. To move forward, Evvie and Dean will have to reckon with their pasts—the friendships they’ve damaged, the secrets they’ve kept—but in life, as in baseball, there’s always a chance—up until the last out.

A joyful, hilarious, and hope-filled debut, Evvie Drake Starts Over will have you cheering for the two most unlikely comebacks of the year—and will leave you wanting more from Linda Holmes.

You know this isn’t going to be your typical romance when the story starts out with Evvie packing up her car to leave her husband but she is interrupted when notified that he has been in, what turns out to be, a fatal car crash. So we know she wasn’t as happily married as everyone, including her best friend Andy, seems to think. Evvie, it turns out, is quite the skilled liar.

But this isn’t an unreliable narrator story. Instead, it is the awakening of a young woman with a troubled marriage behind her. It is also the story of a washed up baseball player who has gained national infamy as having some sort of psychological breakdown. They end up hiding out together, becoming good friends and eventually fall in love. But there are a lot of bumps along the way.

As I was reading this, I was reminded of another book I read recently, The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary. The women have similar relationship issues and these books are both romantic comedies, this one American, the O’Leary, British. They are both very good reads.

There are some really funny, laugh out loud moments here, as well as a few times I found myself in tears, making this an emotional read for sure. The small town in Maine is presented as almost another quirky character and that worked for me. If you like humor with your romance, and I certainly do, put this on your “must read” list!

7/19 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch™

EVVIE DRAKE STARTS OVER by Linda Holmes. Ballantine Books (July 2, 2019). ISBN 978-1524798727. 320p.

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