LEAVING is a psychologically astute story of a second-chance love affair and its many consequences

LEAVING is a love story about and for “mature” adults. Most stories of passionate love feature young people, but LEAVING is the story of two 60-year-olds who reconnect nearly 40 years after their college love affair ended due to a misunderstanding. Sarah is a widow and Warren is married but unhappy. His wife, Janet, possesses many positive qualities but he has become dissatisfied and restless because she is not intellectually suited to him, an architect, traveler, and lover of opera. Over the years, he has realized that they are not a good match. When he runs into Sarah at the opera, he realizes she was his true love, and their connection is instantly re-established and undeniable.

Roxana Robinson expertly handles the fallout from their affair, exploring the many moral and practical consequences of their decision to proceed despite some misgivings. Sarah worries about being a homewrecker and violating the code of the sisterhood. But her concerns are no match for the intellectual and sexual passion she and Warren share. After all, he is unhappy in his marriage and the moral dilemma is his, not hers, she thinks. She’s self-aware enough to realize how cliched the situation and her rationalizations are, but she has been alone a long time and also believes she should have married Warren all those years ago. What to do?

Warren’s twenty-something daughter, Kat, is furious about his betrayal of her mother and destruction of the family unit upon which she has constructed her life. She is a fierce and determined adversary, and an expert emotional manipulator, particularly as her wedding is coming up. Her actions force Warren to examine his various identities (man, husband, father, architect/employer) in an attempt to craft a workable solution personally and practically.

Robinson allows us to see the affair from the participants’ point of view as well as from the perspective of Janet, Kat, and Sarah’s adult children, Meg and Josh. Robinson has created complex, believable characters and examines their thoughts, emotions, and actions with her usual psychologically astute approach. By the halfway mark, I saw three or four potential climaxes, all bad, but I remained absorbed in the story as it played out in a slightly different manner than I’d expected.

Like the opera at which Sarah and Warren bump into each other in the first chapter, LEAVING is about passion, honor, betrayal, and choosing the life you want. Our inability to accurately predict the consequences of these choices is just one of the reasons they often lead to heartbreak and even tragedy.