When his old college friend Laura, with whom he'd long since lost touch, dies of cancer, she names New York City voice actor Geoffrey as executor of her will. He is a little surprised but accepts the job, just as Laura had suspected he would, having remembered him as loyal and dependable. So he travels up to Laura's small childhood home town, the place she settled in as the high school music teacher after her husband and partner in their renowned jazz group died and left her a young widow. And in small Shady Grove, Geoffrey comes face to face with Laura's dear friend Marian, another young widow still mourning the accidental death of her husband a decade before and the one woman who has the potential to change Geoffrey's easy, emotionally remote existence.


Goeffrey's life is very orderly and settled. He takes enough voice over work to be financially secure. He's in a long term but emotionally distant relationship with Rita, a woman who makes no demands of him and who enjoys their convenient and detached situation as much as he does. He goes out with friends but seems to have no emotionally fulfilling relationships with the possible exception of his psychoanalyst brother Alex. He's contented in this life until he meets Marian and looks deep within himself to see that in fact he does want a life of connection and love. He promptly breaks off with Rita and sets out to convince Marian that their immediate attraction and ease means that they should both risk change.

Just as Geoffrey is initially set in his life, Marian is equally set in hers. She is also in a relationship that doesn't ask her to engage her emotions and allows her to continue to live as Buddy's widow, stagnant in her loss rather than willing to try opening up and moving forward. She owns a nursery and maintains many of the gardens that she and Buddy built together in their landscape design firm. She lives in the home they built and drives Buddy's truck. His larger than life presence, even after death, is the comfortable wrap and barrier around her heart. The loss of Buddy and her happy marriage was devastating and resulted in not only her continued guilt over the circumstances of his death but to an emotional paralysis she has never tried to shake off. It is this closed off inertia that Geoffrey will have to overcome to reach the Marian he wants.


Both Geoffrey and Marian have to do a lot of soul searching as they look to see exactly what shape they want their lives to take. Geoffrey in particular needs to understand who he is and just who Marian is too, trying to understand her marriage and relationship with Buddy and how they made her the woman she is now. He also has to face the decisions he made in the past, in particular the decisions he has made in regards to Simon, Laura's lost and floundering younger brother, and what those decisions say about him as well as how they might have formed others as well.

The novel is a very slow introspective tale with echoes of therapy and the search for self-realization. It is very psychological and philosophical and because of this can seem as emotionally remote as the characters it portrays. With all the obsessive talking about feeling and relationship and love, it is still hard to pinpoint why Geoffrey and Marian fall for each other. He enjoys her uninhibited laugh and feels comfortable in her presence but there's no indication of what Marian finds so magnetic about him that despite wanting desperately to close herself off from him she cannot. There is a similar undefinable, langorous magnetism about the novel as a whole. A deeply examined novel filled with soul-searching scrutiny, the characters' initial lack of connection with life carried through the novel far longer than it should have, making it more difficult for the reader to develop a connection with them either. Those looking for a novel about relationship that delves deeper and questions far more intensely than a typical love story will find their something different here. ( )

I cant agree with the other 3 reviewers as I found this book very easy to read and very different from anything I have ever read before , not predictable, not romantic in the normal sense and just different and this is what I liked about it, I would reccomend it . ( )

Looking at the cover of this book, almost beckons the reader to open it's cover and discover a wonderful story inside. However, for me this wasn't the case. It's unusual after having read so many books during the last three years to find one you can't quite connect with but can't really explain why. This is one of those for me, however it may not be for you. This is a novel about two characters drawn together by an unusual set of circumstances.

Geoffrey Tremont, currently living among the busy life in New York among his sophisticated friends, and a bit too organized for me as a man in a relationship with Rita, whom he claims he loves but doesn't really think about her much when they are apart. Does that mean they aren't really in love or simply not right for each other. It seems they are both very content with their individual lives but have issues when it comes to compromising ways that they would each have to give things up if they were to be successful at their relationship.

Geoffrey gets a break from this relationship when he is called as an executor of an old friends will. This shows the reader throughout the book, how the impact we make in relationships we get involved with will and can have lasting results in those people's lives, something we should consider with everyone we meet. Laura Welles was someone from Geoffrey's past, two years ago, from college who asks him to deal with her estate and to send the funds to the music program at the college she attended.

This brings Geoffrey into contact with the only remaining relative of Laura's, her brother Simon. Together the two of them work together to try and make sense of their lives at this point and to find a way to sell Laura's home in Shady Grove. When they both arrive, Geoffrey encounters his possible soul mate, who is also grieving a recent loss, Marian Ballantine, who seems to know Geoffrey based on the conversations she used to have with Laura. Geoffrey seems convinced that Marian can change him in ways that he wasn't willing to compromise with Rita over. However Geoffrey will soon learn that the situations that Marian has gone through in life will also make her a victim of circumstance and has changed her in ways she may not be willing to give up. It's those qualities that have enabled her to survive up to this point.

Will they both be able to find a way to get past the barriers they both have put in place based on the circumstances life has dealt them or will they come to realize that some people will never possess the ability to change, even if something good comes into their life they've been waiting their whole life for?

You'll need to read, The First Warm Evening of the Year by Jamie M. Saul to find out what happens. I received this novel compliments of William Morrow, a division of Harper Collins Publishers for my honest review and I have to say I'd rate this one a 3 out of 5 stars. I just could not connect to the characters well enough to truly care about what happens to them. Perhaps its because they were too set in their ways or just had to many issues to deal with in life, that they were content to be who they were. It just didn't resonate with me, even though the writing is well thought out and the premise sounding interesting as well as the cover draws you in. I know others might be drawn to this story but it just didn't work for me. ( )

I very much wanted to love this novel, as it looked like a promising summer read: perennial New York City bachelor goes upstate to a small town to settle an old friend, Laura's estate, and falls for Laura's friend Marian, a widow.

For all the potential of the storyline, the characters were minimally developed and the plot floundered under the weight of pages of introspection and angst from the protagonist, Geoffrey. There was never-ending dialogue between Geoffrey and anyone who would listen to him (including total strangers), about his unexpected feelings for Marian, what they might mean, and whether she reciprocated. It was a bit like being in middle school and listening to a friend dissect every word and glance of her latest crush, searching for meaning.

There is a secondary plot line centered on the reappearance of Laura's wayward brother, Simon, which generates some brief tension but then fizzles. Overall, there was little plot tension and it was often difficult to keep reading a story that felt like it was going nowhere. There was more written about Geoffrey's thoughts and feelings on the possibility of a relationship with Marian, than the relationship itself. For all of Geoffrey's going on about Marian, it was difficult as a reader to detect any deep chemistry or connection between them. The author successfully created a portrait of small-town life with a good sense of setting, but unfortunately, with such a slow-moving plot and underdeveloped characters, it wasn't enough to hook me into the story, which dragged on with minimal payoff. ( )