Jo Ann Walther

Mind over Mirror: a Romantic Beach Read for the Bifocal Set (Life, Love, and Bifocals) (Volume 1) Jo Ann Walther

College reunions present a pageantry of who has found fortune, fallen far, remained buff, aged poorly, married well, or divorced often. For Olivia Walker MacLearn (Liv) the stakes are higher because forty-six years before the internet spit out her contact information onto reunion organizer Guen?s laptop, Liv had cut all ties with her friends from Kentucky?s prestigious Morrison College. Not so much as an exchange of Christmas cards has tied her to her past. But when an invitation to a 46th reunion arrives, Liv is strangely drawn to the place she fled, even though she knows that an explanation of why she went off-radar could reveal a secret long kept. Then an email arrives from Rich, the man who broke her heart those decades ago at Morrison, and with it tempting thoughts of a relationship mulligan. Liv guardedly communicates with her college buddies, always under the microscope of her fiercely-loyal best friend Mary Alice. The five share life stories as they email back and forth. Like so many middle-agers, unceremoniously yanked into the non-exclusive guild of senior citizens, Liv and her friends struggle with the dichotomy of mind and mirror. They acknowledge, mostly with humor, that their bodies may be beyond the bloom of youth, but their minds still brim with passion. As the reunion approaches, increasingly intimate conversations between Liv and Scotty, her best college buddy, a lanky boy turned intriguing man, bring both clarity to Liv?s past and a new set of questions about her future. Might a new relationship develop or will the spark of an old love, extinguished for decades, reignite? And if that spark should spring forth once more, can the fire burn brightly regardless of the years gone by?