The Last First Kiss

by Walter Bennett

Overview

Ace Sinclair has one eye on a hurricane churning up from the south and the other on his old high school sweetheart, J'nelle Reade, whom he has invited, on impulse, to spend a weekend with him at his Outer Banks beach house. Now in their seventies, both widowed, Ace and J'nelle expect to relive old memories. They soon discover that the past is still with them more than they know, and they are pulled into a haunting search among old memories of betrayals, mistakes and missed chances for the illusive truth of their lives. As a dangerous hurricane turns in the Atlantic and heads their way, time runs short, and they must choose between the tidal pull of old dreams and the future's wide unknown.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781733681698
Publisher:	Lystra Books & Literary Services, LLC
Publication date:	09/14/2021
Pages:	222
Sales rank:	1,024,263
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.51(d)

Editorial Reviews

10/25/2021

In this warm and reflective septuagenarian love story, Bennett (Leaving Tuscaloosa) brings readers to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for the intimate beach-house tale of long-ago sweethearts rediscovering each other as a hurricane bears down on the coast. At age 75, widower “Ace” Sinclair meets his first love, J’nelle Reade, at his family vacation home, the first extended encounter the one-time couple has had since high school. Tentative at first, their weekend of wine and lost time soon finds the pair facing both their shared and individual pasts, their own looming mortality, the feelings that have never quite gone away, and the possibility that maybe, despite all that’s messy and resolved in their lives, they can open themselves to each other.

Bennett proves adept at stirring together past and present, plus feelings of doubt and trust, in an evocative natural setting. As “the squeal of the wind around the eaves and distant boom of the surf fade away” the couple find themselves dancing despite Ace’s nervousness about how she’ll respond to his trembling hands and aged flesh. With exquisite tenderness, Bennett writes, “And then she does that thing she used to do that melted the space between them and transfigured everything, that erased time: that soft sigh of her body into his.”

Much of this short, affecting novel’s page circles those feelings of “erased time”: As Bennett’s protagonists look back on their short time together long ago, and face together all the life and love that each experienced in the interim, the gulf between youth and age never quite vanishes. It can’t, and Bennett is wise enough a writer to acknowledge the challenges this possible couple faces. But the joy of that coupling, and their long-ago comfort and arousal in each other? That’s the same as it ever was, dramatized with a lyric power that will thrill readers of grown-up romance.

Takeaway: This stirring grown-up romance finds old flames rekindling a full lifetime later.

Great for fans of: Anne Tyler, Pat Conroy.

Production grades Cover: B Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews

"Walter Bennett's literary range is startling. From the surefooted Leaving Tuscaloosa, a coming-of-age novel set in Civil Rights era Alabama, to Last First Kiss, a meditation on the depredations of aging, Bennett writes with utter authority. At first blush, this new novel seems like a beach romance set over four days, with the menace of an impending hurricane adding tension. The main characters--high school sweethearts now in their mid-70s-are people of great privilege and means. They don't miss any meals during their autumn rendezvous on the Outer Banks, and they know their preferred bottles of wine and artisan spirits. But Bennett rips the covers off their comfort as they revisit the 50-some years they did not share. He, a Vietnam vet, and she, a Peace Corps volunteer, have lost their spouses, still suffer from PTSD, and now face medical challenges they cannot escape at the beach or anywhere else. As foolish as teenagers, they go for a midnight swim and barely survive a pre-storm rip tide, some of the best writing in the book. Then they decide to ride out the hurricane in place. What they recognize about the shambles of their lives is affirmed by the year-round African-American residents of the island who have put their village back together, year after year, storm after storm, only to be walloped again by the irrefutable power of Nature."

Georgann Eubanks, Author of Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction

Walter Bennett's The Last First Kiss is a true gem of a novel, finely cut, brilliantly polished, and chosen from excellent stone. He's taken what could have been a simple love story and imbued it with such honesty, originality, and sincerity that it rises above its genre and into rarely visited territory. The book is a gift of clean prose, realistic dialogue, a setting that leaps from the page, and, most of all, two characters who transcend labels and carry us into the complicated depths of human individuality. Bennett ventures bravely into aspects of life-aging, regret, imperfection, doubt-that most writers glide across or avoid entirely. I admired this book greatly and enjoyed it from first page to last.

Roland Merullo, Author of Breakfast with Buddha and A Little Love Story

From the Publisher