Age Is Just A Number
The best thing about Miranda Dickinson’s Searching for a Silver Lining is the built-in playlist of Fifties rock. Everybody is clued in to the post Elvis music scene, this book introduces the reader to a fresh bout of nostalgia.
Mattie Bell fell out with her beloved grandfather Joe and is shattered when he dies without contacting her. She promises to make amends somehow, and her way of doing it is befriending a retired singer Reenie Silver from a band Joe loved.
Mattie runs a vintage shop in a English village and accidentally runs into the feisty octogenarian Reenie when she visits the home for senior citizens where she lives. Mattie’s idea of pleasing her dead grandpa is taking Reenie in a road trip to connect with her former bandmates. Reenie had abandoned her group, The Silver Five, just before their big gig at London’s iconic night club, the Palm Grove, and has lived with the regret for sixty years.
Mattie and Reenie convince the new owners of the club, grandsons of the Palm Grove, to back the reunion. One of them, Gil, comes along for the ride with the two women. It’s not quite clear why they go on a road trip in a vintage car that the acerbic Reenie calls a rustbucket, instead of flying to their destinations, but then the book would have been much shorter.
The novel is not high on style, occasionally too melodramatic, but its consistently sunny disposition carries the reader along. Reenie is an interesting, if self-absorbed character, who would make a great poster girl for geriatrics with her boundless energy and undiminished talent. When Mattie and Gil are ready to crash after a long drive, Reenie totters over to a nearby pub to belt out songs on the karaoke system. Her bitchy battle of wits with a former bandmate is hilarious. Mattie comes across as a wimp compared to Reenie. Of course, it’s no spoiler that Mattie and Gil fall in love. At least in books two attractive thrown together by circumstance, always turn out to be single!
Searching For A Silver Lining
By Miranda Dickinson
Publisher: Pan MacMillan
Pages: 448
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