Review by Booklist Review
Romantic Novelists' Association award-winner Gayle delights with this novel starring 82-year-old Hubert Bird, a Jamaican immigrant who has called Great Britain home for almost sixty years. After the death of his wife, Joyce, and the relocation of his daughter, Rose, Hubert keeps to himself. To save Rose worry, he has created a fictional social life but when she schedules a visit, Hubert decides he must rustle up actual friends, which means taking risks like babysitting for his new neighbor, Ashleigh. So begins Hubert's journey, which includes him and Ashleigh starting a campaign to end loneliness. Interspersed are flashbacks that reveal the racism Hubert faced upon arriving in England, his meeting Joyce and their hardships as an interracial couple, and allusions to a son no longer in the picture. With a winning main character, this absolutely heartwarming story unfolds with just enough surprises and heft to keep readers engaged. A natural choice for fans of Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand or any of the myriad recent books about cranky men finding late-in-life joy.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
British author Gayle (Half a World Away) returns with a winning tale of a lonely 82-year-old widower. Hubert Bird, a Black immigrant from Jamaica living in south London, gradually lost touch with all of his friends after an unspecified traumatic event five years earlier. When single mother Ashleigh introduces herself as his new neighbor, he shoos her away to take a call from his daughter Rose, whom he's lied to about having a trio of pals so as not to worry her. When Rose says she's planning a visit, he scrambles to find friends to fool her. So begins Gayle's engaging narrative, enriched by flashbacks from 1950s England, when he faced hardships and racism and fell for the white Joyce Pierce while working at a department store. After Joyce gets pregnant and they plan to marry, her racist family disowns her. Decades later, Hubert's son battles drug addiction and Joyce faces early-onset dementia. In the present, with Hubert still at a loss for friends, he babysits for Ashleigh and agrees to be part of her "Campaign to End Loneliness in Bromley," which ends up going viral with Hubert as its spokesperson. While a late plot twist feels destabilizing, Gayle finds many endearing moments in Hubert and Ashleigh's search for friendship and community. Readers will be touched. (July)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Gayle leaves lad lit behind in this sentimental novel about a lonely widower living in England. Hubert Bird just wants to be left alone. The 84-year-old Jamaican man has been living in the U.K. for nearly six decades; now, scarred by a traumatic event that happened five years ago, he's withdrawn from his friends, choosing only to talk to his cat, Puss, and his daughter, Rose, a professor living in Australia whom he misses intensely. Rose worries about her father's isolation, so much so that Hubert has invented a coterie of imaginary friends to assuage her concern, complete with backstories so elaborate that "he had to make a record in a notepad to help him keep track." But when Rose announces she's coming to visit, Hubert realizes he's going to have to make some real-life friends, and fast. He turns to his neighbor Ashleigh, a young Welsh woman who's tried to reach out to him before without success. Ashleigh manages to entice Hubert into joining a "Campaign to End Loneliness" in their London borough of Bromley. Hubert manages to make a lot of friends but still doesn't know how he's going to tell Rose that he lied to her for so long. The book goes back and forth between the present and the past, when the reader learns about Hubert's arrival in England and his relationship with his late wife, Joyce, a White woman whose family disowned her for marrying a Black man. Gayle's novel doesn't exactly break new ground--the "grumpy old man who turns out to just be lonely" trope is well worn, and Gayle's prose is, for the most part, workmanlike. This novel is resolutely sentimental and ends with an unnecessary chapter that would have been better left out. But despite all that, Gayle's book works for what it is, and that's a testimony to the author's charm and unfeigned sweetness--the reader can tell he cares a lot about Hubert, and his compassion is contagious. A little manipulative and a lot sentimental but sweet and charming enough that some readers won't mind. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
