Vera Stein Is Fine

Julie Murphy

€ 37.99

Welcome to Starlight Palms, a favorite retirement facility among Hollywood actors and industry professionals tucked away just outside of sunny Palm Springs. Filled with forgotten scream queens, eccentric screenwriters, and heartthrobs of the past, it has a brand-new Vera Stein, age forty.

Vera knows she’s missed her chance at a life worthy of the silver screen, just like she missed her chance at ever finding true love. But Vera isn’t one to take chances. She’s spent most of her adult years caretaking for her dying mother and her movie star boss’s ego. Now abruptly houseless and jobless, Vera has nowhere to land, so to grandmother’s house we go!

The Starlight Palms Senior Living Center is midcentury Hollywood down to its pastel-painted bones. This desert gem isn’t lacking in saucy plot twists (swinging seniors, anyone?) or a leading Elias Buckley, the on-site doctor and Vera’s former ill-fated college fling and”for reasons that will stay in Vegas”legally her ex-husband according to the state of Nevada.

It’s not long before Vera falls into a job as the activities coordinator and under the spell of a certain smart-mouthed doctor… Suddenly all those empty years in LA look less like mistakes and a lot more like backstory. With a fresh start at her fingertips, Vera begins to see that even with all the detours she’s taken, there’s still a Hollywood ending (and maybe even a happily ever after) in sight…