The Young Widow

Joan Sax, Irvine’s main character in The Young Widow, leaves her home town of Toronto a year after her husband’s passing. The people she meets on her Caribbean cruise are not the kind of people she’d come across in the course of an average day of city life. Her new acquaintances all had their own baggage, which makes this novel appeal to all kinds of people. Relaxed, all stuffiness aside, cruising is a different kind of vacation than what she and her late husband were used to. Joan appears vulnerable, weak, almost introverted but soon shows a side of herself that is anything but. Can she jump over the hurdle which represents the expectations of others concerning how a recent widow should behave? Can she shrug off the depressive cloud the hangs over her; that of falling ill like her identical twin, beset by early onset Alzheimer’s. For her own sake and for the world at large, she threw herself into the movement to fight for Dying with Dignity Canada to make the world a better place … just in case.