Category: Chick lit for older women. Contains mild sex, violence, and profanity
Can you imagine Romeo and Juliet retold with the two lovers being 60-year-old grandparents? I wouldn’t have either, but I’m glad Jeanne Ray did, because her novel Julie and Romeo is the lighthearted result.
Julie Roseman is a divorcee, Romeo Cacciamani a widower. They are both florists in a Boston, Massachusetts suburb, and when they fall in love things get complicated. Star-crossed lovers aside, this story is as much about tangled family relationships as it is about romance: mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, ex-husbands, and, of course, the generations-long hostility between the Rosemans and the Cacciamanis. When both sets of children act to keep their parents apart, and the 90-year-old Cacciamani matriarch sticks her oar in, the cold feud escalates into war.
The story has a happier ending that Shakespeare’s play. I won’t give away anything more, but I did enjoy this funny, easy read about passion and romance between mature adults—who don’t always act like mature adults. Why should the kids have all the fun?