Barbara’s Pick
April, 2019
Good Riddance
Elinor Lipman
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, February 2019
When I heard the premise of Good Riddance, I was immediately hooked: A high school teacher to whom the yearbook had been dedicated dies and leaves her heavily annotated yearbook to her older daughter. The daughter, referencing Japanese organizational wiz Marie Kondo, decides the yearbook does not “spark joy” and leaves it in her NYC apartment building’s recycling bin, where it’s picked up by another resident, who decides to go to the class’s 50th to do research for a documentary (which becomes a podcast instead.
The heroine, a former Montessori teacher whose current “job” is completing an online chocolate-making course, has her own baggage, not the least of which is how to get her mother’s yearbook back from the neighboring busybody who snatched it. The author has quite a cast of characters and manages to weave them all through the plot in the most charming way.
This book was utterly delightful. Apparently the author has written 11 novels before this one, and I’m excited to read the others!