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.”
