I’ve managed a much shorter time period between Marianne Cronin’s The One Hundred Years Of Lenni and Margot arriving on my TBR table and actually sharing my terribly important thoughts, than I did with last week’s book, The House in the Cerulean Sea.

Only six week this time, rather than three months! Things are looking up. 😉

At the time of the Just Arrived post, I wrote:

“…this book is a 2022 winner of the Alex Award, given by YALSA (the Young Adult Library Services Association, I believe) in the USA, and has proven hugely popular internationally.

From the synopsis, it’s a heartwarming but (I strongly suspect) bittersweet, “spring and winter” story of Lenni, seventeen years old and hospitalized with cancer, and eighty-three-year-old Margot, who is a fellow patient in the same hospital. They strike up a friendship, and the titular one hundred years is the sum of their shared ages and life stories. 

It’s not a spoiler to say that one or both of them is going to die, because the backcover matter tells me that “their last…[story]…begins here.” So I suspect tears will be shed in the reading thereof. And have already resolved to have tissues on hand.”

Well, I was not wrong about the tears and need for tissues—but Lenni and Margot is neither lachrymose, nor saccharine. Nor is it a maudlin tale. It is heartwarming (like The House in the Cerulean Sea) and bittersweet, but also wry, humorous, and insouciant—although not necessarily all at once.

Despite some reservations re the potentially saccharine and/or maudlin, I was swiftly drawn in and ended up being engaged by and involved in the intersecting lives of Lenni and Margot. I loved Lenni’s “voice”, in particular, but Margot was far from being an “also-ran.”

So if you want a story about life and death and “all sorts and conditions” of people, that will make you laugh and cry, and occasionally reach for those tissues, then The One Hundred Years Of Lenni and Margot could be the book for you.

If you enjoyed Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, or Eleanor Oliphaunt is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, then I believe the odds of your liking The One Hundred Years Of Lenni and Margot will shorten even further.

Yep, you’re right: I am recommending it.

I read a trade edition, 392 pages, published by Doubleday. The book is on loan from another avid reader and must now be returned. 😀