The Second Bloom of Emily Norris: A Novel of Midlife Reinvention

She is fifty-two, six months divorced, and sleeping in her sister's guest room beside nine boxes she has never unpacked. Her ex-husband is engaged to a woman half his age. Her settlement will not last the year, and the only thing anyone wants to discuss is what she plans to do about that. So on the worst morning of a very bad year, Emily spends every dollar she has on a hundred-and-fourteen-year-old art supply shop that has been shut for sixteen years. Sagging roof. Working waterfront. A hand-lettered FOR SALE sign nobody has touched in a year. It is a catastrophe. The pipes are older than she is. The stock is four decades past saving. The town of Anders Landing has watched four newcomers fail on that street and is waiting, politely, to watch a fifth. Only two people do not seem to be waiting: a woman of seventy-three who has been painting in the back room of a bookshop for years, and a quiet man across the street who gave up his own trade a decade ago and has excellent reasons for staying out of other people's business. And Celeste Van Doren has a beautiful, well-funded, entirely reasonable plan for the waterfront that does not include a shabby shop full of dust.