REVIEW: The Monday Night Heartbreak Club by Jane Lovering

JayneB Reviews / Book Reviewsalcoholism / First-Person / found family / LGBTQIA characters / self discovery / self-reformation / Yorkshire2 Comments

Is your love life a bit of a disaster? You’re not alone…

When Fee finds herself drunk, dumped and directionless on Valentine’s Day, she stumbles across a flyer for a new club, for people united by heartbreak. Intrigued, she joins a motley group of strangers at a quiet Yorkshire wine bar the following Monday night.

There’s Margot, in the middle of a bitter divorce;

Annie, whose husband of forty years she suspects is having an affair;

Wren, quietly nursing her own romantic regrets;

and Fraser, who may have mistaken the group for a dating opportunity.

But what begins as a weekly wallow soon becomes something more, especially when the club starts an undercover operation to discover the truth about Annie’s husband and his infidelity.

For Fee, who’s only just holding on to any self-worth she had left, the Monday Night Heartbreak Club offers something she never expected: purpose, friendship and maybe even a fresh start.

And then there’s Flynn, the sarcastic bartender who might just see the real Fee beneath the chaos.

Feel-good and empowering, Jane Lovering’s brand-new novel is about heartbreak, healing and the surprising ways people find each other when life falls apart.

CW/TW – near physical assault, drinking, lack of self-esteem, coercive misogyny  

‘We’re all lonely. Aren’t we? Isn’t that why we’re here? It’s not so much the disappointment about Valentine’s Day, or that we’re all heartbroken, it’s the fact that we’re all on our own now.

Dear Ms. Lovering, 

Well I do like this one. A band of misfit toys unite and take down the Abominable Snowma–, wait that’s not right. A band of people unlucky in love unite to help one of their own and discover all kinds of things about each other and themselves. I take exception to the description of Flynn in the blurb as sarcastic, though. 

I’d been thinking that this group would be a bunch of women like me, who wanted to meet up every so often, drink, shout about what a bunch of bastards our exes were, sing two verses of ‘I Will Survive’ and try to pick up a man at the bar. I’d not considered that real emotion might come into things.

We’re back in Yorkshire where Fee is drinking away her blues at the wine bar across the street from her grotty flat and her even grottier life with the grottiest thug boyfriend. Fee drinks a lot.The barkeep is an unassuming young man but Fee’s having none of his kindness. She sees the club flyer and wonders who will show up and will they just be whingers. 

… it dawned on me that this was the first time I’d felt included in so long that I couldn’t remember when it had happened before.

Everyone who shows has some reason to be there, even Fraser who’s apparently not dated at all. Looking for this club to mean something, to them all, rather than just be a place to mope, Fee suggests to two members that they secretly help Annie discover what’s going on with her husband. Soon plans are laid and the game is afoot. But along the way, something lovely happens. 

…the wine was doing its work, blunting the edges of life,

Fee will not impress people straight off the bat. In her first scene, she’s as soused as if she’s been marinated in a wine barrel. She’s also prickly. As the story progresses, we will see the reasons behind this as well as the exteriors and initial actions of the other characters. The quote (actually first said by Who Knows) “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about” is apt. But the battle the group takes on first leads them to begin to bond together. This book leans heavily into found family.

I could be that Fee they thought I was, at least for the purposes of being in the club. Once a week I could pretend, couldn’t I? Reinvent myself to be the purposeful, ambitious person that I might once have been …

We could make this club something. We shouldn’t be meeting to complain, to moan about our circumstances and become bitter while watching elderly men play increasingly competitive table games. We could DO something. We could help one another.

Then with one club member sorted, one seemingly finding new purpose in his life, and two others banging (as Fraser bluntly says), I wondered what the last quarter of the book would be about. It’s not at all what I expected. This is where the lessons being learned get put into play. Truths of self must be found and examined. 

I found myself sitting up straighter. I’d been brave. For the first time in my life, I’d been brave. I’d been the Fee that I wanted to be.

Then the main couple have to see if their jagged edges can be fit together. Even someone who seems to have no worries actually has some. A lot of time is spent on Fee and Flynn working out where they’ll go from here. They’ve both had knocks in life and damage done to them by others. Fee, having realized why she has acted as she has and put up with all that she has in life and just beginning to feel the warmth of acceptance, is faced with having a barely imagined dream taken away. Flynn has been struggling to find his own way in the world and now must begin over again. 

You all listened to me. You made me feel like I mattered.

I like that Fee is now even more determined to stand on her own two feet. Part of this is that she’s experienced having no one believe in her and having to support herself. Fee is a survivor, though. Flynn might start out a little tentatively but he clearly wants to join in with the stake-outs as well as trying to catch Fee’s eye. Fraser (who kind of reminds me of Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead) is actually probably my favorite character while I laughed at Eddie always “getting the car out.” Perhaps the underlying issue of one of the characters is sorted too easily and the end dragged just a teensy bit but overall, I think effort is made for these people to figure out what is holding them back and then changes are made. By book’s end, I feel there has been healing and new chances for everyone. B

~Jayne

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Jayne

Another long time reader who read romance novels in her teens, then took a long break before started back again about 25 years ago. She enjoys historical romance/fiction best, likes contemporaries, action- adventure and mysteries, will read suspense if there's no TSTL characters and is currently reading more fantasy and SciFi.

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