Maggie's married life ends when her husband and the father of their two grown daughters announces he has found a new love, his pretty, young twenty-something assistant.
Maggie has money of her own, she is an accomplished professional woman. In the aftermath of divorce, she begins to think longingly of her first love, a boy she met while working as a waitress in a resort town in Canada, Robert Flaubert.
At the time, Maggie decided she wanted more out of life and went back to America to continue her education, meeting the man who became her husband and earning a doctorate.
She has some guilt about the break-up with Robert and is fantasizing about returning to Canada and getting in contact with Robert again, maybe to put to rest the guilt and her feelings about him. But she hasn't been in touch with him or with any of her old friends from Canada for over twenty years. How will they respond?
She heads back to the restaurant/dance hall were it all started, the Harvest Moon. When she gets there, she finds the place closed and for sale. So she buys it, intending to fix it up and reopen the dance hall.
Getting back in touch with old friends, she is grieved to find out that Robert died years ago. But he didn't spend his life yearning for his lost lover. He was happily married and had a son, a son who is the very image of his late father, as Maggie is shocked to discover. The son, a man in his mid-twenties, is very definitely interested in getting to know his father's old flame a whole lot better. A whole lot better!
What a book! Frankly, I just skipped vast amounts of the text. Too many lyrical descriptions, too many old love letters from Robert, too much poetry. Yeah, it was that kind of book. And Maggie is a bit of a dope. You learn at the beginning of the book that she has earned a doctorate. Yet as she is getting the Harvest Moon ready for reopening, she feels, "a kind of self-satisfaction that Maggie had never felt before" as if doctorates grow on trees. So silly, she spends a few weeks cleaning up an old house and never mind the years she spent getting her doctorate. And, at one point in the story she sneers at another woman for her feminist leanings: "'Are you a feminist?' Maggie asked mockingly."
Anyways, I think Maggie is dopey and I think this story is dopey too.
For another review, see https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kc-mckinnon-2/dancing-at-the-harvest-moon-2/.
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