I started Go Gentle with high hopes. One hundred pages in, I was hooked. I was deep-diving into Stoicism and thinking about starting my own coven (more on that later). Adora Hazzard, the 50-something heroine, was a dream.
And then. And then.
It turned into a flimsy rom-com. Chick lit at its worst.
The plot became strands of spaghetti thrown at a wall, with a major detour into #MeToo territory that felt particularly jarring. There were simply too many threads in this meandering story and not nearly enough depth devoted to any of them.
My theory? Maria Semple saw a looming deadline and panicked.
Maybe a happily-ever-after that involved riding off into the sunset with a wealthy man felt too predictable. Too risky. Too easy.
So the book zagged. And then zagged again.
I want to save you the trouble on this one.
But if you really want more, sigh, here goes.
The Book I Thought I Was Getting
The setting is appealing. Our heroine flits between the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, and Semple gives us plenty of New York texture along the way.
Adora is a philosopher who becomes enmeshed with a wealthy family in need of what amounts to an in-house philosopher.
Yeah, that’s a cool idea.
I loved learning about her philosophy work, and now I really want an enjoyable novel about a philosopher. Adora has meaningful work, a full social life and a teenage daughter she’s trying to connect with. She’s smart and interesting and has built a life that doesn’t revolve entirely around finding a man.
Then there’s the coven.
Adora lives in a UWS co-op building full of character—and characters. She’s the mastermind behind organizing a “coven” on her floor, pooling the resources and talents of a group of 50-something women who want to age gracefully, communally and with joy.
Now this is the book I wanted.
Give me smart women in midlife figuring out friendship, motherhood, work, aging, philosophy and what comes next. Give me more coven. Give me the complicated teenage daughter. Give me women building interesting lives together.
Tell me that happily ever after.
Nope.
And Then There’s an Art Heist
What we get instead is Adora mixed up in an art heist with a very questionable man.
Yep, it’s a love story. And not a very good one at that.
Every heroine needs a backstory, but Adora’s is a doozy. She was a comedy writer in the 1980s, when sexual misconduct at work—especially in Hollywood—was commonplace and routinely tolerated. Adora was horribly mistreated, and that history eventually becomes one of the book’s major threads.
It’s serious material. But in a novel already juggling philosophy, motherhood, female friendship, aging, wealth, romance and an art caper, it feels like one more very big idea competing for space.
Ultimately, this is the thread Semple leans into: second chances, true love, reclaiming yourself, yadda yadda.
And somehow the fascinating 50-something philosopher with her coven and complicated life ends up in another ho-hum midlife romance. It turns out our 50-something heroine is still sexy! She’s rediscovering her sensuality! She’s falling in love!
Fine. But I wanted so much more for her.
So What Exactly Is Go Gentle?
Is it a caper?
Is it a romance?
Is it a cultural criticism of how the creative industries treat women?
Is it a midlife coming-of-age novel?
Yes.
And that’s the problem.
Maybe a more skillful—or simply more disciplined—novel could pull all of those threads together. For me, the menu was too broad and generic, with no house specials.
What makes Go Gentle particularly frustrating is that the beginning showed me a book I really wanted to read. Adora was interesting before the plot started working so hard to make her life interesting. Her philosophy, her friendships, her daughter, her New York world and, yes, her coven were enough.
One hundred pages in, I was ready to recommend this book to everyone.
By the end? I was ready to recommend the book it could have been.
Final Thoughts
Go Gentle had me completely hooked for its first 100 pages—and then slowly lost me. Too many plotlines compete for attention, and the romance ultimately feels less interesting than the woman Adora already was.
One-line takeaway: Go Gentle starts as a clever, original look at women, aging and reinvention, then gets tangled in romance, an art caper and one too many big ideas.
For fans of: Maria Semple, New York City novels, complicated 50-something heroines, midlife reinvention, female friendship, philosophy with a side of fiction—and readers who don’t mind a plot that takes some very unexpected turns.
Where I read it: Mostly by the pool. This was a pretty quick read and I only finished it because it was my book club assignment.
Would I recommend it? Not really. I loved the book Go Gentle promised to be in those first 100 pages. I just wish I’d gotten to finish that one.
You can find this—and everything else I’m reading this year—on my running 2026 book list.
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