I picked this book up only because I loved Adler’s second book, Happy Medium. (I haven’t read her first yet) For this book, I didn’t feel particularly moved by the blurb. I wasn’t interested in anything to do with a treasure hunt and second chance romance is usually a turn off for me. Yet I still picked this book up and I am so very glad I did. This ended up being a Bad Decisions Book Club for me and an easy A.

Nina’s life fell to bits. Her promised permanent position at a college in Boston didn’t materialise and so she’s unemployed. She breaks up with her boyfriend because she realises that he doesn’t actually love her and she doesn’t have a place to stay because she was due to move in with her boyfriend and had given up the lease on her own place. So she ends up back home in a small town in Maryland living in her childhood bedroom. Nina is rudderless and so so lost.

But so is her childhood neighbour. Quentin had been living in Paris with his fiancee when his life imploded, so he’s back home as well, living on the other side of the duplex Nina’s parents live in. Nina and Quentin’s bedrooms share a wall and have windows very close together. Nina and Quentin haven’t spoken in 17 years until they are reunited by these circumstances. They had been the closest of friends, until things went wrong in their teens and Quentin moved away and cut contact with Nina.

Quentin and Nina start talking again tentatively, but there are so many hurt feelings to navigate. The conversations are fraught. Quentin suggests that they restart the treasure hunt they began as teens. Incidentally, it’s also the reason that their friendship ended. Drawn to each other, they nonetheless decide to go ahead with it, even if only for the monetary reward that Quentin says is still available.

The treasure hunt was set up by an eccentric seltzer magnate in the 1930s and no one had solved it in the intervening 100-odd years. As far as the treasure hunt goes, I enjoyed the clues and the process Quentin and Nina go through to try and solve it. There are hijinks and searches and library time. All very enjoyable to read about.

But if you guessed that the real gold lay in the emotional archeology they engage in, then you’d be right. Very slowly, they extend olive branches towards each other. It’s not all smooth reconnection, though. There are bumps in their road back to each other, but inexorably they move closer together, slowly like two magnets entrapped in the mud of the past, nonetheless drawn to each other. The emotions are so rich and full and real that it makes for a very fulfilling read.

There is a bleak moment in this book that a) really works and b) totally surprised me. I was sure this was going to be one of those books that just cruised towards a HEA, but things fall apart for our heroes in a surprising way.

I also really enjoyed reading about characters comfortably in their 30s. They’ve lived full lives and bring a lot to the table in terms of experience. Nina, in particular though, is lost. With her career on the rocks, she’s not at all sure what she should be doing next. She feels like a tremendous failure returning to her parents with her tail between her legs. She thought she was better than this small town, but the town surprises her with the ways in which it has changed.

The writing in this book is also really immersive and easy to get lost in. So often there would be sections that would make me gasp with delight because they were written so well. This is just one of them:

Just because we’ve made a deal to continue our search for Fountain’s treasure doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what happened. It just means I’m willing to bury it back down in the deep, dark underbrush of my heart where it dwelled quite contently before Quentin’s sudden reappearance so rudely flushed it out from its hiding place.

Why is this book an A for me? First, for the myriad reasons I mention above. But also because I stayed up LATE reading this thing. I kept fighting sleep to try and get just one more page read. For context, my baby is now only waking once at night (okay, sometimes twice) so there was definitely the potential for me to get some good rest, but no! While she slumbered peacefully, I read voraciously. I would also periodically slam the book down on the bed and exclaim to my partner that this was Such a Good Book. I did this a number of times. These are my indicators that a book is something special. I heartily recommend this book to the Bitchery – it’s excellent!