BOOK REVIEW: How To Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley

When age makes you invisible, secrets are easier to hide

Daphne knows that age is just a number. She also knows that society no longer pays her any attention – something she’s happy to exploit to help her hide a somewhat chequered past.

But finding herself alone on her 70th birthday, with only her plants to talk to and neighbours to stalk online, she decides she needs some friends. Joining a Senior Citizen's Social Club she’s horrified at the expectation she’ll spend her time enduring gentle crafting activities. Thankfully, the other members – including a failed actor addicted to shoplifting and a prolific yarn-bomber – agree.

After a tragic accident, the local council threaten to close the club – but they have underestimated the wrong group of pensioners...and with the help of a teenage dad and a geriatric, orphaned dog, the incongruous gang set out to prove it.

If I had to sum up this book in just a few words it would be delightful chaos.

The opening scene felt like a bad improv class but in the best way, utterly absurd and comical but setting up the book to be a little bonkers. Our leading lady Daphne was beautiful, on the eve of her 70th birthday but still feeling youth and excitement deep in her heart, starting a plan to find some new friends not knowing it would be much more of an adventure than she’d expected. She’s full of secrets that eventually seep through and explode to the surface in a series of slow-burning, intense reveals that balance out the wholesome warmhearted moments with drama and intrigue.

We jump between Daphne and her unlikely group of misfits, including a shoplifting 75 year old actor, a retired paparazzo, a teen dad who owes money to a gang, a social club organiser whose first meeting resulted in a fatality, a young foster child with mutism, a widow who definitely didn’t kill any of her five husband, and a rather fabulous dog named after a former prime minister - slowly learning about their lives and watching as they all find their way together at the local community centre and beyond.

Every single person opened up on the page and showed us the loneliness we can find even surrounded by people, the need we have for real human connections and the transformative power of friendship. On the surface this may look like another story about a ragtag group working to save their community centre and actually saving themselves, which it is in a way, this story had so much personality, heart and sparkle that it definitely stood out on the shelf.

A devilishly cheeky, fun story of friendship and hope showing that all adults are just big kids with bills that left me smiling all the way through.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

I received an advanced reviewers copy of this title in return for an honest review.

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