An elderly British woman named Grace Winters receives a letter from a former student who is feeling adrift after the death of his mother and other changes. Her response encompasses the whole story laid out in this book: from her own personal tragedies to the life-changing gift from a friend she hasn’t seen in years.
I thoroughly enjoyed the first two thirds of this book, which I would class as feel-good literature with a bit of a sci-fi bent. Grace is an interesting character, and the suffering she has endured feels real and relatable, which makes her life-affirming tale seem believable.
The book changes in the final act, however, into a sort of half-baked good-versus-evil story. The turn doesn’t make much sense, and the resolution doesn’t actually resolve the initial question Grace was seeking to answer. It was quite disappointing, and I’m left feeling that the author had painted himself into a corner, having written a feel-good beach read with a sci-fi premise. It really needed a sci-fi climax, but instead we got the beach read version that side-steps all the big questions in favor of putting a tidy bow on things.