Wildwater Walking Club - Book Review

When life deals you lemons, go walking. Noreen is persuaded to take a buyout at her Boston shoe company. She realizes just how unbalanced her life is and struggles to find out who she is and what she should be doing. She makes friends with two neighbors on Wildwater Way and they call themselves the Wildwater Walking Club. This novel is about healing from life's mundane upsets and learning to find your way by putting one foot in front of the other.

I should be the right demographic for this novel, but in fact I just didn't get into Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and really loathed the movie Must Love Dogs," based on one of Claire Cook's previous novels. If you loved both of those, you'll love Wildwater Walking Club. I found it a pleasant enough read. I'd love to see it wildly successful and made into a movie, simply to promote walking.

The main character, Noreen, works for a Boston athletic shoe company that is merging with another company. Her secret boyfriend works for the other company and persuades her to take a buyout. They buyout is actually a sweet deal with full salary for a year and career coaching. But Noreen immediately learns that the guy was a real snake in the romance department, as he stops taking her calls. She stocks up on shoes and pedometers at the company store and sets about bemoaning her situation.

She has little going on outside of work. She has a lovely house but never spent any time getting to know her neighborhood. Each chapter of the book is a day, subtitled with how many steps she walked. Day 1 is 132 steps, followed by 154, then 28, then 17. I must say that her pedometer is either broken or only records steps after walking 100 or so, or she was using a bedpan...

But by Day 5 she begins walking in her neighborhood, logging over 10,000 steps and finally meeting her neighbors on Wildwater Way.

Noreen makes acquaintance of Tess next door -- a teacher with a teen daughter who is going through her last-summer-before-college rebellion. They add Rosie, who moved her family in with her dad when her mother died and who operates his lavender farm. So, we now have a full panoply of women's mid-life issues. And lots of lavender recipes.

They start meeting for daily walks and set a goal of totaling their steps and adding in airline miles to go for a reward trip.

I identified most with the walking club aspects. I meet and walk with friends every week. Walking and talking is natural therapy. I often have connected more with a person I just met and walked with for an hour than co-workers I've seen around the office for years. Noreen can't just focus on her own woes as she gets to share the everyday minor crises her neighbors face. The walking club helps reconnect her with life outside of the office and commute.

Meanwhile, Noreen starts going to career counseling group sessions and meeting others who are at the same point in life. I have to wonder whether those laid off in the current deep recession won't resent the perks these people have with salary continuation during buyout, etc.

I do like it that this really isn't a romance book, although there are many chapters about Noreen healing from her breakup and realizing she hasn't had a meaningful romance so far in her life. She meets potential dating material at the career counseling group. What turned me off about the movie version of Must Love Dogs was the desperation of a woman to find a man at mid-life. My own choice, should I lose my husband, would be to just walk more and get more cats...

In the last quarter of the book, I begin to think that walking has made these women stupid. As in my neighborhood, clotheslines are forbidden. Rather than take mature course of organizing neighbors and petitioning the town council to overturn the ban, they choose to act like teenage vandals.

Then they are off to a lavender festival across the continent, in Sequim, Washington, where I walked my second volksmarch walk ever. They stupidly decide to hike out 10 miles to a lighthouse, despite warnings that it is too late in the day and the sun is setting. With this decision and the vandalism, they end up with no negative consequences. What sort of lesson is that?

At least in the romance department, Noreen seems to be making wiser decisions by the end of the book. I still have grave doubts about her ability to support herself once her golden parachute paychecks run out. Her interim career choice might earn pocket change, but I wouldn't recommend it for maintaining a mortgage.

Overall, this was a pleasant read and I only found myself screaming at the characters to grow up a couple of times. I can understand where Noreen is in her life and wish her well. If the book inspires others to look around them for walking buddies, it is a good thing.

The author, Claire Cook, is promoting walking clubs on her web site, ClaireCook.com and has a walking group guide of tips for forming your own walking group.