GILFs

In Marshall’s LGBTQ+ romance novel, a middle-aged, newly retired woman falls in love with a woman 20 years her junior amid a messy divorce and a deadly pandemic.

It’s 2022, and 55-year-old Amanda “Mitch” Mitchell is a newly retired surgical oncologist living in Santa Monica, California. As a teenager, she and her best friend, former Wall Street executive LaShantay Biggs, made a pact to “unplug at fifty-five” and are now getting used to early retirement. Mitch has long been separated from her wife, so the two friends decide to dive back into the dating pool together, where Mitch meets Tara Debarre, a 35-year-old pediatric specialist. They hit it off right away, despite Mitch’s reservations about their age gap, and their relationship kicks the novel into gear. There’s not a lot of conflict in the story’s first half, which creates an issue in which the narrative seems to go out of its way to avoid anything that would make the story too heavy. Eventually, though, Tara moves forward with a previous plan to get pregnant through artificial insemination, and Mitch worries that she might become a burden to the much-younger Tara as she gets older. However, these reasonable fears are quickly sidelined by the struggle of Mitch trying to divorce her wife, Joliet. This leads to Joliet victimizing Tara by outing her pregnancy at work and throwing a brick through her car’s window. Mitch declares war to get even. However, that plotline is almost immediately put aside when, out of left field, a pandemic caused by the (fictional) Chimeravirus sends the world back into Covid-style lockdowns and causes Tara return to her hometown of Sonoma, California, to have her baby. This turn, and the pacing issues earlier in the novel, make for a rocky read as the novel darts between various themes and dramatic situations without ever solidly landing on any of them. Still, the relationship between Mitch and Tara is consistently endearing throughout.

An often sweet love story, but one that lacks focus.