A gem and a
Irving was Augusta’s first love, but he broke her heart and married another.
Augusta worked in her father‘s pharmacy, and Irving was the delivery boy.
Sixty years later even though they loved each other for that long, they never had contacted each other.
Can they rekindle their love?
We follow Irving and Augusta in two timelines. The 1920s and then the 1980s.
When Augusta knew she wanted to be with Irving after all these years, she decided to try the love elixir she and her aunt made years ago to see if it would work again.
Can she do it?
The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern is a book that will have you missing the heartwarming characters because of Ms. Loigman’s fabulous storytelling skills.
It is not a romance but a story of decisions made, family, and the regrets of poor communication.
It is another gem you won’t want to miss, and is a “do your heart good”? read. 5/5
Thank you to the publisher for a copy of this book. All opinions are my own.
The Prescription for Cynics
My favorite critic is an older British woman who inspires me to read about people very different from me. Augusta Stern enters a retirement home in 1987 and faces her past. Two men fight over her, and we slowly hear why that happened in the ’80s. My point: I am not the target audience, yet I related to the protagonist anyway.
Augusta loves pharmacy, but her great aunt’s recipes intrigue her. Could herbs and spices enhance clarity and fertility, harmonizing with traditional medicine and doctors? The Augusta turning 80 shows us that this flirtation with homeopathic medicine may not have ended well, but we do not figure out the specifics until later in the novel.
Don’t get me wrong. Some of my exes seem like charming adults, but living in a retirement home with two of my exes talking about what it all meant, like Rob Gordon in High Fidelity, sounds like my idea of Hell. Augusta is emotional about it all but handles it in stride for the most part. When I am eighty, my teenage self should seem distant.
It adds up to a unique and personal literary experience. Prohibition and gang activity make entertaining historical fiction. I grew to care about Augusta. Loigman does a great job refuting my arguments in the Author’s Note. Try your turbulent eighties for those who feel too old for second chances in their young, adventurous forties.
A second-chance story of misunderstandings and magic
The title was charming. The premise was intriguing. And the novel was an appealing page-turner, although a bit predictable. But sometimes that’s the kind of book I feel like reading, with a heartwarming happily ever after.
“The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern” tells the story of a woman of a certain age getting a second chance at love with her first boyfriend of sixty years ago. The narrative is told in two timelines and two locations, alternating between 1920’s New York and 1987 Florida. In addition to Augusta’s coming-of-age story, author Lynda Cohen Loigman inserts a story of Augusta’s Aunt Esther, a woman who learns to both survive and thrive despite the limitations of society.
Growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in New York, Augusta had always wanted to become a pharmacist like her father. While he encouraged her, they both knew it would be difficult as in the 1920s women were not expected to have a career. When Augusta’s mother dies, Aunt Esther comes to live with them – to keep house, cook, and clean.
And that’s when the novel becomes something more. Esther helps people, mostly women, with her mixtures and elixirs, potions and powders, and often her homemade chicken soup. This is where the novel veers into magical realism, and also provides a message about women’s strength and ability to overcome the time period’s restrictions.
“If a person is denied a formal education,” Esther told Augusta, “She must be inventive in her quest for knowledge She must study the folktales and the old stories. She must learn however she can. She must use every tool at her disposable.”
This is a second chance story of misunderstandings and magic, medicine and miracles, fate and forgiveness. It is about Augusta, who “wanted to be a woman who yes, had suffered losses, but whose heart had not yet been broken beyond repair. A woman who was curious and hopeful and who still believed in the glimmers of magic that made their way quietly into the world.”
Chicken Soup For The Soul
Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC ebook to read.
Like chicken soup for the soul with a bit of magic and a dash of heartbreak along with laughter and a dose of romance sprinkled with hope. I really enjoyed this light and nostalgic read of, The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern. A predictable story but entertaining.
Augusta Stern becomes a pharmacist and takes over her father’s pharmacy. Augusta’s Aunt Esther is a huge influence in her life and encourages her to dabble in herbal remedies too. Augusta Stern reluctantly retires in 1987 at the age of eighty years old and relocates to a retirement community, Rallentando Springs, in Boca Raton, Florida. Augusta bumps into an old friend, Irving Rivkin, from her hometown of Brooklyn, who was her father’s delivery boy at the pharmacy, as well as, her boyfriend. It triggers painful memories of their courtship when Irving abruptly abandoned her. The story is told in flashbacks of her youth in Brooklyn and current year 1987.
Will Augusta finally get the answers she deserves of why Irving abandoned her all those years ago? Did Irving ever truly love her or was he simply playing the part? Is it possible to recapture the lost magic of youth?
I enjoyed Lynda Cohen Loigman’s book, The Two-Family House also.