Almost isn’t quite a town, but there’s no real accurate way to describe it. It’s so far north it’s nearly in Canada but it’s still in the U.S. It’s a place like many others, populated by average everyday people, and nothing particularly exciting happens there. It is a pretty perfect place to catch the Northern Lights every now and again.
Except for one night. One Friday night in the middle of winter, strange things start happening to people who are in the midst of doing ordinary things.
Longtime best friends start falling in love with one another, completely without warning. A man planning to go to bed early finds a woman camping on his property. A woman doing laundry in her boarding house basement encounters a new resident. A man tries to shake himself out of his loneliness by going to a bar.
This book is composed of stories that take place on that one night. They’re very loosely connected in that there is a narrative hook that threads one story to another. Some are love stories, some are stories of hope, miscommunication, friendship, and/or self-discovery.
I found many of the stories endearing but after a while they all started resembling one another in some way. Some stories definitely captured my heart but some were a little less impactful for me, and I found the thread that tied the stories together a little gimmicky.
In the end, though, Almost, Maine was cute and heartfelt.
