Family is the cornerstone of Julia McDonnell's (A Year of Favor) Mimi Malloy, At Last!, a later-in-life, coming-of-age novel about the nature of memory. Maire "Mimi" Sheehan Malloy, age 68, sneaks cigarettes and Manhattans, worships Frank Sinatra and thought she was finally settling into her forced retirement. But when a leak springs in a closet ceiling of her modest apartment in Quincy, Mass., the divorcée--one of seven children in an Irish-Catholic family and herself a mother of six daughters--finds her quiet life upended. Dick Duffy, the building handyman with a "bum leg... and a big heart," addresses the leak, and Mimi discovers a striking silver pendant with an aquamarine stone. How did it get in her closet? Mimi, who's suffered mini-strokes that have left holes in her memory, cannot remember anything about the pendant or its history.
While Mimi and Dick, a World War II veteran and widower, begin a relationship, Mimi's grandnephew enlists her help for a genealogy study for school. Mimi's sisters and daughters press for details from the "glory days" of childhood, but what they find is a painful past, long repressed, featuring an abusive stepmother and a long-lost baby sister. Might the pendant somehow be connected?
MacDonnell's multifaceted novel unspools via flashbacks. Mimi's no-nonsense narrative voice and a cast of well-drawn characters take readers on a humbling journey that explores the past and present; the bonds between parents, children and sisters; the power of secrets; and heroic acts of love. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines