What better way to kick off summer than with a quintessential summer read?  Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties is that.  It has family, angst, challenge, betrayal, lies, truth, and love.

In a nutshell, the story is of Maggie Harris, a woman in her fifties, whose husband of nearly thirty years decides that he doesn’t want to be with her, that he has a new love, and that he wants a divorce.  Maggie is thrown into a tailspin.  She is near-bottom before she catches herself and starts reconstructing her life.  And she isn’t perfect at it.  That’s one of the things I liked about this book.  Maggie makes mistakes.  She is human.  She doesn’t have all the answers, doesn’t necessarily know how to handle to most crucial turns of her life.  I totally identified with her.

Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties is well-written.  The dialogue is snappy and real, the plotting sound.  I listened to the audiobook; the narrator was amazing, which surely added to my enjoyment.  That said, Maggie did frustrate me at the start of the book, wanting her husband back, dreaming of his returning, carrying on a little too long, I thought.  If I’d been reading a print version of this book I’d have skimmed some of this.  Fortunately, the reader was so good that I was able to hang on until the plot picked up, which it did in a satisfying way.

If you’re looking for an engrossing read starring a cast of very real, very likeable characters with whom to spend some free time with this summer, Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties may be it.