If Only: A Novel

I read a lot of Judith Arnold's romance novels in the 1980s and 90s, but both of us have gotten older. These days, love stories with blissful HEAs are nice but not very relevant to our lives anymore. So Arnold has moved on to write about what she knows now, and I can definitely relate.

If Only portrays a 60+ year old, retired school music teacher who just wants to be left alone in peace. Unfortunately, her daughter and teenaged granddaughter live with Ruth and her husband Barry, and her son has just announced that he and his wife are separating because he is in love with a younger woman. Her other daughter is a therapist who has expert advice for everyone, despite the fact that her kids are running wild.

As Ruth tries to figure out the appropriate amount of involvement with her grown children's problems, she also looks back at the choices she has made in her life and imagines how her life could have been different. This isn't Sliding Doors; Ruth doesn't magically exist in two different timelines. The “if only” passages are brief fantasies about where the road not taken might have led - if Ruth and Barry had bought a different house, if she had learned to ski when her friend invited her on a family trip, if she had taken piano lessons from a better teacher...and in her fantasies, she is usually rich, famous, and/or trouble-free.

Many of the “what if's” relate to Ruth's high school years in the 1970s, when she briefly played keyboards in a garage rock band, and tried to control her crush on the cute lead singer. The flashback chapters are lively and fun to read; who can resist a nice Jewish girl wearing bell-bottomed jeans, playing gigs with four guys, and singing about getting wasted?

But although Ruth eventually makes peace with the way her life turned out, the tone is resigned and not necessarily upbeat. Several plotlines about her daughter and granddaughter remain unresolved, and frankly Barry is a sexist jerk who lets Ruth do all of the housework and heavy emotional lifting. The ending suggests that everyone lands where they're supposed to be, so you might as well enjoy it. Nice for Ruth's peace of mind, but this reader wanted something better for her. I guess I'm still looking for that HEA fantasy, even if Arnold has learned that reality is not a romance novel.

ARC provided by Net Galley in exchange for objective review.