Sarah

In Tim McDonald's quietly moving celebratory novel, widowed "Doc" is attracted to Emma from a distance not because she is the moral and physical opposite of his late wife Molly, but because she so strikingly resembles her. Doc has acceded to his lonely state of being, assuming, in his 60s, that he has had the love of his life and that all he will have to sustain him from now on are his memories. But the woman he meets and begins to know and fall in love with, who so strongly evokes the charm and tenacity and dignity of his late wife, while inspiring revered memories of Molly, which are tenderly explored in the novel, also assumes a stature and importance of her own, wholly independent of any reference to any other person.