BOOK REVIEW: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman

The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman has been garnering a lot of buzz. It’s a feel-good second-chance love story, so compelling that I read it in just two sittings.

Augusta Stern is about to turn eighty, and is nudged (against her inclination) into retirement from her position as a hospital pharmacist. Her niece has helped find her an active senior retirement community in Florida. Augusta is not crazy about this idea, but she goes, moving away from Brooklyn. The first day there, she comes across Irving Rivkin, a blast from her past. Sixty-two years ago, Irving was the delivery boy working in her father’s pharmacy. He was also her first and only love.

Augusta was devoted to her father, Solomon, and to his profession. In the 1920s, when Augusta was a teenager, women were rarely pharmacists and those who were faced significant discrimination. But Augusta had great determination and the support of her father. However, Augusta’s mother died (of diabetes, one year before insulin treatment was discovered) and Augusta’s great-aunt Esther arrived to help raise Augusta and her sister. Esther was, to Solomon’s dismay, a folk healer. On occasion, when none of Solomon’s medicines worked, and doctors had given up, Esther’s chicken soup, ointments, or...potions? cured the ills of their neighbors.

Augusta is enthralled, and yearns for a way to combine her father’s scientific knowledge and compassion with Aunt Esther’s somewhat magical elixirs, to use all means at her disposal to help people. 

The novel’s chapters alternate between 1987, in Florida, where Augusta is dealing with Irving, a man she’d never expected (or hoped) to see again, and the early 1920s. As kids, Augusta and Irving began as friends. Their friendship matured to love. And then, Irving disappeared to Chicago without so much as a goodbye, marrying another girl immediately, and breaking Augusta’s heart. Of course Augusta carries a grudge. But she also carries a lot of guilt. Because she believes that in experimenting with Aunt Esther’s elixirs, she might have been responsible for Irving’s defection.

Is it too late for honesty, forgiveness, and renewed love?