April 2015: The Little Old Lady - Discussion Highlights

We met on a foggy Thursday night and enjoyed a fabulous dinner.  Thanks for all your delicious contributions, ladies!  I think guests at the Grand Hotel would have been impressed... and the old age home residents and prisoners would have loved it!.  We ended the evening with a selection of decadent desserts and some laughs. 

Things we liked about the book:

• a fun, easy read
• we liked the spunk of the old people and the really great friendships that they shared
• Martha... she's definitely the most well rounded of the oldies and we all really liked her
• we had fun comparing life in the old age home, prison and the Grand Hotel and admiring how well the oldies adapted to each environment.  We'd definitely choose to spend our retirement days in the Grand... all 3 locations had their limitations, but the Grand certainly offered the most freedom and opportunity!
• we had a good discussion about the elderly... what it meant to grow old (but still be young at heart); the need for safe, but stimulating environments with lots of freedom; what kind of old people we'd like to be; and our relationships with the elderly people in our lives.

Things we didn't like about the book:

• we would have liked more of a back story about each of the characters so that we'd feel like we really got to know them
• the book may have suffered from translation... it has it's funny moments, but some laughs were likely lost along the way
• it lacked the clever writing of books like The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared.

We'd recommend this book:

• to someone looking for a fun beach read
• most of us agreed that we'd read the sequel (The Little Old Lady Strikes Again) just for fun, but that it wasn't a must-read or a must-buy