The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern floats along on its characters’ charisma and engaging plotline. Memorable protagonists such as these don’t come along every day; too bad about the central romance and the way the leads behave because of it, because it knocks this book right out of DIK contention.

In 1987, New York-loving pharmacist Augusta Stern meets the end of her fifteen-year-old hospital career with dignity, but with resentment. Her boss figured out that she’s about to turn eighty, not seventy and it is gently suggested she retire. Augusta moves to a Florida retirement community, where many of her living friends from her old neighborhood dwell. There she runs into Irving Rivkin – the former love of her life and current target of her fury. The long-divorced Irving may still be interested in her – and may also have a snowbird sweetheart neighbor.

Flashbacks take us back to 1922 and tell us how Augusta entered into the profession. Her mother’s death from diabetes, just before insulin injections become common, is a deciding factor (her devastated father never recovers and is reluctant to let Augusta apprentice under him in spite of her interest), another is her lively Aunt Esther’s magical compresses, broths and compotes. Aunt Esther has the homeopathic knack for helping the barren become pregnant and healing the hopelessly sick; the neighborhood comes to think of her receipts as magical. Augusta catches her aunt chanting over the mortar and pestle and wonders if she’s a witch, but Esther explains that it all goes back to her childhood in the old country. Esther sets up a sort of backdoor pharmacy dedicated to healing ‘women’s complaints’ – though not everything, she admits, can be fixed.

Soon, Augusta finds herself caught between her aunt’s more homeopathic methods of healing and the ones doled out at her father’s pharmacy. Pharmaceutical college looms, where she will be a Jewish student among Catholics. Irving becomes her father’s delivery boy, and she is instantly maddened by his presence. Their love-hate-love relationship escalates toward something big, but both Esther and Irving become entangled in the lives of the amazingly named local mobsters, Mitzi and Zip Diamond. Danger looms. Proud but poor Irving and foolish, romantic Augusta make a series of dumb mistakes that lead to their estrangement. Decades later, she’s tempted to apply Aunt Esther’s old recipe to her current problem. But will Irving and Augusta finally find love?

This book has a Big Mis lasting sixty years, and that is what drags the grade down to middling level. That’s a total shame, because I loved these characters; I liked spending time with them and I loved how real and wonderful their world is. Augusta is practical, no-nonsense and intelligent – but she’s also a secret romantic who has not forgiven Irving for standing her up and worships Jane Austen. Irving is a nice guy with a teasing tongue who sees Augusta’s worth ad is sometimes too passive for his own good.

The problem here is

These characters deserve a much better love story than this. It doesn’t help that sixty years later, Augusta and Irving are as jealous as teenagers over each other, and they refuse to TALK, which has ruined their lives for decades. All I wanted was someone to TALK, but no one talks out their issues until the last quarter of the book, unveiling decades of heartache. Sure, we get a nice happily ever after, but at what cost?

I haven’t been so frustrated with a book in years. The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern is warm, funny, and truthful – but its plot contrivances bog it down.