The Last Best Thing

by Kate Sebeny

"What started out 50 years ago as an annual party evolved into a yearly reunion and then a way of life. It’s sort of like a geriatric Big Chill.”

Sam and Sarah are the elderly owners of a farm in central Iowa that turns into a private retirement community when it also becomes home to a disabled friend, a destitute neighbor and her daughter, and an expatriate artist. Together, this close-knit group confronts the hardships and disappointments of age and infirmity with courage, humanity and humor.

But beneath the surface, this rustic “home away from the old folks’ home” is not everything it seems. One of its inhabitants is a killer. Another is her victim.

How far will these lifelong friends go to help each other when their way of life is threatened? Witness what loyalty and sacrifice really mean to this unlikely group of people gathered together under one roof.

136 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2015

About the author

Kate Sebeny is the author of the recently published novella The Last Best Thing. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Kate earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Iowa and her master’s at Iowa State University. Amongst other things, she’s taught undergraduate writing at two universities, and has been editor of a regional newspaper and at a national magazine. She is the recipient of several grants and awards for her writing. Kate has also renovated every place she’s lived, including the historical Madison County jailhouse in Winterset, Iowa. At work on a new novel and a short-story collection, she resides at her current rehab project on the Des Moines River, along with her three dogs and three cats.

Reviews

[Lois · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you enjoy your characters being described in second person, rather than self-revealing, through their own words and deeds, then The Last Best Thing: A Novella might appear, at first glance, to be just the book for you. From the very first page, the reader is introduced to the positives and negatives of the novella’s protagonists by their nearest kith and kin. Largely, however, the negatives are the focus of attention. Firstly, the male head of the household (who is now anything but, having been invalided by chronic heart failure, so that, as he himself describes it, “I’m a lousy helpmate”) is not only down on himself, but even his wife cannot be allowed to appear as a worthwhile individual without him backhanding her in the very next sentence. “She’s a saint. Providing a candidate for sainthood can’t be disqualified for smoking like a chimney, drinking like a fish, cursing like a sailor and screwing like a floozy, that is.”

The daughter then shows how totally lacking in empathy she is when, in refusing to upend her life in Denver to help her mother tend her sick father, she describes the latter in the following banal, trite and unfeeling way: “The Alzheimer’s kept him existing long past the time he’d ceased living.” She then goes on to ask her mother: “Why do you want to hang on to Dad like this, Mom? He’s long gone.” This, despite clear indications that he is far from being totally senile and defunct.

Do not, however, let first appearances fool you. From this rather emotionally brutal beginning emerges an extremely positive tale of how a group of lifelong friends gets together to form a private retirement community. (“What started out fifty years ago as an annual party evolved into a yearly reunion and then a way of life.”) Blended in with the lively description of all the idiosyncrasies of a range of characters as they experience the final phase of their late adult years, enters the element of mystery and preternatural death. In delving to the depths of an unfolding mystery in their midst, Kate Sebeny highlights the strength and humor that are essential to maintaining a favorable quality of life in what, physically at least, are destined to be one’s declining years.

This novella should appeal to those who wish to gain insight into the world of the elderly and the infirm, and the various attitudes that others have towards them, as well as to those readers who are entering, or immersed in, their later years. The author’s native Iowa background forms a fitting setting for this insightful and, at times, amusing tale, so those who hearken from that neck of the woods should enjoy it with especial relish.

[Vicki Salloum · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Last Best Thing is filled with enough wisdom, sensitivity, good will, and wit to shock a reader. It’s consoling to know that elderly friends could live on a “geezer commune” in an isolated area of central Iowa and actually find love and happiness despite congestive heart failure, a temporomandibular disorder, senility, and enough other ailments to fill a bathtub. Extraordinarily, considering a dark turn the story takes, this novella had me smiling—at Betty’s “glazed-carrot orange hair,” Henry’s Viagra, and Sarah’s sweatshirt on inside-out and backwards on the fourth day of every week so it “didn’t get dirty so fast.” The writing is quite beautiful.

[Nate Briggs · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt a lot of resonance with this book about elderly people walking “the last mile” in rural Iowa because I am something of an elderly person and my literary roots are also in Flyover Country. The book is sentimental: because people do tend to get sentimental toward the end — and the phrase The Golden Years seems very ironic as you understand the improvisational nature of these lives. How people cope with isolation, sickness, and loss. No one hopes to be old and frail. And few of us do well when it comes to planning how to be old and frail.

And yet, if that’s all there was to this, it would be a very discouraging narrative. Which it is not. Living under the same roof, in a kind of “geriatric commune” the gang is muddling through with sense of humor, and dignity, intact.

Younger readers (by which I mean those under the age of 30) might not find a lot to understand in this, right now. But you will understand it later — and so that’s reason enough to read it now.

[Nate Briggs, for the Kindle Book Review]

[Kellan Publishing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well-written by Kate Sebeny. This is the tale of the elderly as they live out the "best" years of their lives. It will make you laugh and cry out loud.

“What started out 50 years ago as an annual party evolved into a yearly reunion and then a way of life. It’s sort of like a geriatric Big Chill.”

Sam and Sarah are the elderly owners of a farm in central Iowa that turns into a private retirement community when it also becomes home to a disabled friend, a destitute neighbor and her daughter, and an expatriate artist. Together, this close-knit group confronts the hardships and disappointments of age and infirmity with courage, humanity and humor.

You can get this book cheaper from our bookstore at: https://kellan-publishing.selz.com/it...

[Lynn Mccarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book from the author to read I enjoyed it good book thanks for letting me have a copy