The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
The distance between 1922 and 1987 in terms of women’s lives and careers is the backdrop of Lynda Cohen Loigman’s romance between two smart people: Augusta Stern, determined to become a pharmacist like her father (although desperate to save more people, perhaps with her great-aunt Esther’s “recipes”), and Irving Rivkin, the long-ago delivery boy from her father’s Brooklyn drugstore. As she relocates to a Florida senior living community, the last thing eighty-year-old Augusta expects is to run into Irving. And it is the last thing she would have said she would put up with, too: Irving left her for someone else, even though she was sure they would be married in their youth.
Flashbacks carry her tale from the pain of growing up and being disappointed, to the anger of an unforgiving and lonely life. From the start of the novel, it is clear the biggest barriers to Augusta’s happiness are her own self-imposed rules and certainties. Shouldn’t her great-aunt’s mystical elixir have made everything work out? Even Augusta’s sister believed that would happen: “One day, either with or without Esther’s recipes, you’ll decide what you want and who you’re meant to be.”
Augusta’s decisions have not made her happy overall. It is hard to air out the sourness and anger that have accumulated. Can she open to love now? As one of her new friends at the senior community urges, “Your father was able to experience that joy … with the woman he loved. Now that your working days are behind you, don’t you think you deserve the same?”
The sweet romance of The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern is good fit for beach reading with its long meander through life’s decisions and magical second chances.
