Review by Kelly Jarvis: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman

This heartwarming novel opens as Augusta Stern, on the cusp of turning eighty, relocates from New York City to a retirement community in Florida where she reconnects with old friends including Irving Rivkin, the boy who broke her heart. Told in chapters that alternate between 1920’s Brooklyn and 1980’s Florida, The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern captures the full scope of its protagonist’s life story.

After losing their mother to diabetes shortly before the discovery of insulin, Augusta and her sister are raised by their pharmacist father who teaches them the importance of his work. When Augusta’s Great Aunt Esther comes to New York to help raise the girls, she brings her old world healing knowledge with her, and soon her soups and tinctures are rivaling the pharmacy’s medicines and pills. Aunt Esther never had the chance to go to college and study pharmacy, so she learned her craft from folktales, comparing herself to Baba Yaga, the witch of the woods who concocts spells and remedies with her mortar and pestle. Esther is able to help customers when modern medicine can’t, curing influenza and infertility with her magic words and potions. She teaches Augusta all she knows, cautioning her about the limits of the craft and explaining that it can provide comfort even when it cannot cure. Augusta’s world is turned upside down when she tries to use Aunt Esther’s love elixir to help her boyfriend Irving see and feel more clearly which leads to a terrible breakup. When the two meet again in the retirement community and old sparks fly, Augusta is faced with the temptation of using the “not love potion” once again to reveal the path their romance should take.

I loved this sweet novel which perfectly captures the soda counters of 1920’s Brooklyn and the retirement community of 1980’s Florida. The octogenarians are fully drawn characters with rich pasts and dramatic futures, and Loigman artfully weaves their backstories into the movement of the plot. By placing senior citizens at the heart of a romance novel, the author transforms the way we understand age, showing that when we are in our eighties, we also retain some sense of who we were at twelve, fourteen, and eighteen years old. In addition to being a romance, The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern is also a book about navigating the inevitable changes of life, overcoming loss and grief, and understanding the enduring love of family. Pick up a copy of this hopeful story; you won’t regret it! You can find it here.

Thank you to NetGalley for a free copy of the book in exchange for a fair review.

Kelly Jarvis is the Contributing Writer for The Fairy Tale Magazine. Her work has also been featured in A Moon of One’s Own, Baseball Bard, Blue Heron Review, Corvid Queen, Eternal Haunted Summer, Forget Me Not Press, Mermaids Monthly, The Chamber Magazine, The Magic of Us, and the World Weaver Press Anthology Mothers of Enchantment: New Tales of Fairy Godmothers. Her first novella, Selkie Moon, comes out in 2025. You can connect with her on Facebook (Kelly Jarvis, Author) or Instagram (@kellyjarviswriter) or find her at https://kellyjarviswriter.com/