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Buy it now from Bywater Books or from our Amazon.com store - Shaken and Stirred  

In the last few years, it seems as if you can’t swing a literary cat without hitting a dying parent. Be it a mother riddled with cancer, a father with a heart condition or a grandparent failing from Alzheimer’s, this frame has been cropping up more and more as an event on which to hang childhood anecdotes, coming out traumas and a reason to mend fences. It’s almost a cliché—but Joan Opyr manages to avoid most of them in her moving look at family and lovers, Shaken and Stirred.

Poppy Koslowski is recovering from a hysterectomy when she receives a call that her grandfather, Hunter, is dying. And she’s been given the responsibility of pulling the plug if need be. She takes her best friend since childhood, Abby, back home to the bosom of her family to help her deal with her mother and grandmother as well as an old love she’s never really gotten over.

So, while the set-up is pretty familiar territory, Opyr does some very interesting things with it. Hunter’s imminent death is not the focus. In fact, it’s rarely mentioned until it actually happens. It’s Opyr’s characters that drive the story, not the plot. First, there’s the wonderful Abby, who has enough sassy black lesbian chick in her to liven things up but never becomes a caricature. Their dialogue is sharp and witty without sounding written. She’s the polar opposite to the moneyed, cultured Susan, Poppy’s first love—but both characters are equally detailed and finely tuned. And someone even wins Poppy in the end.

For character, however, it’s tough to beat her dying grandfather, Hunter, who we see mostly in flashback. He’s a bitter ball of dysfunction: an alcoholic philanderer with a less-than-PC attitude towards children but one who took her and her mother in when they split from her father. Hunter is a piece of work, and Opyr uses her eye for detail and gift for dialogue to put him together like a ship in a bottle.

If there is a fault to the book it’s that it switches from past to present with little warning, which can be a bit disconcerting sometimes. Opyr, however, is a good enough writer to orient the reader quicker than most and, in the end, it’s less of a distraction that I’ve seen in other books with fractured timelines.

Shaken and Stirred is a fine, entertaining read, dealing with family complexity, the longings and ruminations that re-visiting your childhood home can bring and a very unexpected love story. It’s a wonderful novel to round out your summer.

Reviewed by Jerry Wheeler