Annie Hartnett’s newest novel opens with a nursing home cat named Pancakes who has the extraordinary ability to predict when people will die. That’s not very comforting to the nursing home’s elderly residents, and before long, one even jumps out a window to escape the Agent of Death. (He doesn’t.) When Pancakes runs away, he finds 63-year-old PJ Halliday, an alcoholic divorcee who years ago won $1.5 million from a Massachusetts lottery ticket but hasn’t had much luck since.
PJ learns from a newspaper obituary that his high-school crush, Michelle Cobb, is newly widowed at the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, so he decides to head west to win her back. That’s the basic premise of Hartnett’s novel, “The Road to Tender Hearts,” but it’s just the beginning of the wild, wacky, darkly comic adventure this book offers.
PJ is accompanied on the journey by his youngest daughter, Sophie, and two orphans who happen to be his estranged brother’s grandchildren. The kids are reeling from the violent deaths of both their parents, and PJ’s still grieving his oldest daughter, who died on prom night 15 years ago.
Despite some truly dark subject matter, this book grabs your heart with both hands and somehow gets you laughing through tears. Triggers abound, including violence, suicide, and sexual assault. And there’s death. Lots and lots of death. But Hartnett has that rare ability to spin humor and joy out of tragedy. Her plot is nuts. Her characters are flawed. And this novel could not be more wonderful.
