Is there romance after grief? Yes, in Macalester grad's 'The Year of Second Chances'

When "The Year of Second Chances" opens, wonderful, gregarious Gabe has been dead from cancer for a year. His young wife, Robin, is deeply grieving. She holes up in their Minnesota farmhouse, wrapped in Gabe's big coat, drinking coffee from his "Far Side" mug and watching horror movies. (She finds it comforting to see people escaping death.)

"Sometimes I still ran my hand on the inside of his shoes and enjoyed the grooves left by his giant, floppy feet," she says.

It is small, tender gestures like this that make Robin's sorrow so poignant. On the anniversary of his death, up pops a message from Gabe. Written on his deathbed and sent in a scheduled email, it notes that he doesn't want his wife to spend her life mourning and so he has signed her up for a dating app.

"I don't like the thought of you being by yourself," he writes, in Lara Avery's novel. "If you won't do it for yourself, do it as a favor to me."

It speaks to Avery's skill that the novel soars from this implausible beginning. While there is romance and there is humor, this is not (as it might first seem) a meet-cute rom-com. It's a story about grief, and about finding a way to move ahead after a traumatic loss — even if "moving ahead" might not mean what you think it does.

Avery, who lives in Kansas, is a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul and winner of a Minnesota Book Award for her young-adult novel "The Memory Book." She sets her first novel for adults in and around the Twin Cities, sprinkling in references to Interstate 35, Bryant-Lake Bowl, the Mississippi River and Lake of the Isles. (Robin's last name is Lindstrom.)

Robin is reluctant to activate the dating app — "It feels wrong. Like a violation," she tells her brother — and when the dates begin, they are just as awkward as you might guess. How should she dress? What are her expectations? Should she tell each guy that she's a widow? (Things seem to backfire no matter what.)

The men she meets are nice enough — interesting, smart and accomplished. Their biggest failing is that they aren't Gabe, though one comes close. But is Gabe 2.0 really what she's looking for?

The novel's secondary threads are nuanced: Robin's friendship with Gabe's best friend, Levi; her mother's drinking problem; her brother's inability to function as an adult; and Robin's need to put everyone else first.

"The Year of Second Chances" opens in the cramped kitchen of Robin's crumbling farmhouse and ends on the wide-open prairies of North Dakota. The journey from here to there echoes the soaring journey of Robin's wounded heart.

Laurie Hertzel, the former books editor of the Star Tribune, is at lauriehertzel@gmail.com.

The Year of Second Chances

By: Lara Avery.

Publisher: William Morrow, 288 pages, $30.