The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

It's never too late for new beginnings.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

October 2024; St. Martin's Press; 978-1250278104
audio, ebook, print (320 pages); historical fiction

This delightful new novel brings us a story of second chances.  It's about finding happiness in life after getting rid of the baggage from the past.  It's a dual-timeline story set in the 1920s in Brooklyn and the 1980s in Florida.  Both timelines cover the life of Augusta Stern from a young girl to her life at a retirement home and ask the important question of whether it's possible to find the magic of youth no matter how old you are.

1920s - Augusta lives with her sister and her father in Brooklyn.  Her father owns a pharmacy and she knows from a young age that she wants to follow in his footsteps.  She works with him and is in awe about how much he is able to help the people in their neighborhood with their health issues.  When her mother dies, Great Aunt Esther moves in to help take care of the family.  The aunt is very old country and uses unconventional methods to help the sick - everything from chicken soup to herbs and potions.  Solomon is not happy when Aunt Esther starts to treat some of his customers with her magic potions.  Augusta is torn between believing in medicine as her father does but is also drawn to her aunt's mysterious methods.  She is also falling in love with the pharmacy delivery boy, Irving, and thinks that he may be in love with her.  To find out, she secretly uses one of her aunt's love potions on him and the results are disastrous.  When she realizes what she's done, she turns her back on her aunt's 'magic' and vows to follow the scientific methods.  She goes to pharmacy school and takes over her father's store and later works in the pharmacy department of a hospital until they force her into retirement.

1980s - Her niece decides that she needs to move to Florida to a retirement community after she retires.  She never had a chance to make friends or get married and her niece decides that Florida would be a great place for her to spend her remaining years.  Sixty years after she lost the love of her life, she meets him again at the retirement community where he now lives.  Irving wants to renew their friendship but she isn't sure because he hurt her very badly when he married someone else.  She has to decide whether he ever really loved her or whether he was playing a part to keep his job.  Despite his desire to renew their friendship, she is still consumed with anger towards him.  Can they rekindle their relationship from the past or is it too late?

I absolutely loved this book.  By using the two timelines, we get to know and understand Augusta better and she becomes a fully fleshed-out character.  I usually don't read books with magical realism but it fit perfectly in this book and made it even more enjoyable. I'm beginning to question why I've avoided books with magical realism for all of these years - it looks like I've been missing some good books.

No matter how old you are or how far you have traveled in your life - it's never too late for new beginnings.

Buy The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is three hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.   

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