Pocketful of Poseys by Thomas Reed -- BOOK REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW

Pocketful of Poseys by Thomas Reed (Beaufort Books, 2023)

Pocketful of Poseys is a warmhearted family story about a brother and sister charged with scattering their mother Cinny's ashes. The catch is that Cinny wanted her ashes mixed with the ashes of her husband, their father, and scattered in five different places around the world. She also left the money to finance the trip.

Grace and Brian, 40-something twins, head off with spouses and children on a round-the-world adventure, only opening their mother's instruction letters as they go. Through the letters and the travel they inspire, brother and sister learn the secrets of their parents' marriage, explore their own pasts, and forge stronger bonds with their own families.

I found the story easy to engage with and I cared for the characters. I enjoy stories abut families learning to accept and forgive, especially when livened up with a little humor, like this one is.

I though the pacing was a little uneven. There ae two big digressions early on, one providing Cinny's backstory, the other Brian's. I found both distracting because they abruptly pulled me out of the narrative. Then I anticipated the same sort of digression for Grace and the other characters, and I got distracted waiting for those to pop up, which they never did. This lack of similar treatment for the other characters made the first backstory digressions stand out as clunky info-dumps. I particularly missed more information about their father. There are a couple of hints that his death might have been more sinister than a winter car crash, but we get no answers. Again, compared to the almost exhaustive detail we learn about Cinny's past, this disparate treatment stood out.

Still, I really liked the book. Thomas Reed's writing style is smooth and lively, a real pleasure to read. Highly recommended.


FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

Grace Tingley and Brian Posey are forty-something twins whose lives have gone in very different directions. Grace, now a private school teacher in coastal Connecticut, was a PhD candidate at Yale when an unexpected pregnancy threw her plans into a tailspin. Brian, an adventure travel executive in Seattle, barely scraped through an obscure New England college and recently married Ella, after three years in an intimate relationship with a charismatic man from Jamaica.

When their widowed mother Cinny, a charter member of Woodstock Nation, is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, Grace and Brian are there for her last days in hospice care. This is where Cinny reveals her staggering plan for the siblings: They’re to sprinkle her ashes, mixed with their father’s, at a series of exotic locations around the globe—some remote, some challengingly public, all known and loved by the Poseys.

NOTE

I got a review copy of Pocketful of Poseys through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program. My copy was free, in exchange for my honest review.