Book Review: Escape from Assisted Living
Escape from Assisted Living. Joyce Hicks. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, March 23, 2014, Trade Paperback and e-book, 236 pages.
Reviewed by Renee James.
Escape from Assisted Living is a charming, whimsical title that promises to be a somehow lighthearted and entertaining journey into the world of elderly living. Author Joyce Hicks delivers on that promise in ways that surprise and delight.
Betty is an elderly widow from Elkhart, Indiana who has always gone along to get along, first with her devoted husband Chuck, and then with her devoted but smothering daughter Sharon. Sharon lives in fear of disorder and feels responsible for her mother's health and safety.
To relieve her own anxieties, Sharon convinces Betty to move into an assisted living facility filled with happy pictures and contented inmates and perky, patronizing staff people . . . all of which brings out the inner Thelma and Louise in Betty. She decides to slip away from the cloying atmosphere of Elkhart for a train ride west, with a stop in Chicago to check out the contents of her late husband's security box in a downtown bank. Her stop in Chicago opens the door to a series of wonderful escapades, each the product of Betty's unique blend of small-town naiveté and her unleashed sense of adventure.
There is much to love about this book, starting with the elegantly drawn character of Betty who brings a 1950s sense of etiquette and attire into the current day Chicago, and shows us that personal growth can occur just as surely late in life as any other time to those who are willing to explore life's possibilities. Equally compelling, if not always as loveable, is daughter Sharon who personifies oldest-child syndrome—cautious, judgmental, controlling—but who is also unfailingly loving and attentive to her mother. Sharon's growth in this story—and our feelings about her—provides a rich subplot and a touching look at the pressures children can feel as their parents age.
Author Hicks also delivers a series of entertaining secondary characters that roll in and out of Betty's life, ranging from an octogenarian social activist who pickets with her middle-aged daughter, to an elderly widower who works as an extra in movie scenes. Like Betty and Sharon, these secondary characters first appear as paragons of midwestern conformity, but turn out to be delightfully iconoclastic in their own subtle, but colorful, ways.
Escape from Assisted Living is engaging and funny and as comfortable as a warm fire on a chill day. If it has a weakness, it is that it starts slowly. The first two chapters have a lot of back story and shifting points of view. However, those chapters set up what quickly becomes a fast-moving novel filled with unique characters, off beat adventures, and sparkling dashes of wry humor. Escape from Assisted Living delivers on the promise of its title and shows us that there is no age limit on the possibilities of life's adventures.