A note from Agent Palmer: If you’ve spent enough time here, you know my wife and I are readers. Sometimes, we both love a title; others, we don’t. I’ve also written about how to prioritize which books get the honor of staying in our home.
For this entry, Mrs. Palmer and I read the same book. As it turns out, we shared a lot of the same feelings on it. So, what you’re about to read is her take on “Friends of Dorothy” with my footnotes at the end. Spoiler: we both loved it, but read on anyway.
I am familiar with Sandi Toksvig thanks to the popular British panel show QI (and its availability on this side of the pond thanks to YouTube). Sandi has been host of the long running show for many years, having taken over the position from actor and comedian Stephen Fry.
I knew Sandi to be an actor and comedian herself but had not been aware she was an accomplished author as well, of both fiction and nonfiction. I found this out after my husband and I watched a cooking show interview she did in which she promoted her (then) upcoming novel, Friends of Dorothy.
We immediately put the book on our Amazon wish list – perhaps more specifically, my husband put it on his Amazon wishlist and then ordered it the next time he submitted an Amazon order. The book arrived and went in the “To Read” pile, which is actually just the bookshelf with the other books that have and have not been read.
I was the first one to read the book, and I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. It’s not often that a book has me feeling a variety of feelings. This book fulfilled me as a reader but also left me wanting to read more of Toksvig’s body of work.
I would call this a cozy LGBTQ+ British slice-of-life comedy. While that is a lot of descriptors, they all fit and make this book something for everyone to enjoy regardless of gender, identity, or location. It makes you think, it makes you feel, and it makes you enjoy reading something with so much heart but just enough humor and heartache to make it a tale of humanity worth reading and sharing.
Without giving too much away, because this book deserves to be discussed spoiler-free to allow you to experience it yourself, this book is primarily about Stevie and her wife Amber and their interactions with an elderly woman named Dorothy. Stevie is a police constable and Amber is a paramedic. Dorothy is the woman whose home they bought, which she didn’t move out of and which they don’t discover until the night they move in.
Stevie had a different plan in mind when she imagined moving with her wife into their very own house and starting this new chapter in their lives. Dorothy was most certainly not a part of the story. The book takes off from there and you get introduced to a whole cast of characters, from Stevie’s best friend Jack, a closeted gay man who works at the pub across the street, to Birdie, an oxygen-supported “escapee” from an old folks home, and so many more.
It was a delight meeting every single one of the characters – well, except one, but I’ll let you find that out for yourself. Otherwise, these are people who I would love to be friends with. This little section of London seems a wonderful place to live, and I am both slightly jealous that I don’t live there and that all these people are fictional characters. Though, if I had to guess, I am sure Toksvig wasn’t straying too far from real life when creating some of these characters. Toksvig is a proud lesbian and has been happily married to her wife for many years.
So that’s it, that’s all you get. Trust me, that’s all you want from me. Go out and get this book and enjoy it for yourself. You won’t regret it. I know I haven’t.
The notes and the start of the draft that I, Agent Palmer, had for this book were very similar to what my wife Mrs. Agent Palmer just wrote: How we know of Sandi; how this is our first introduction to her writing (and won’t be our last); and how while Dorothy is the central figure, and quite a powerful figure at that, it is the cast around her that makes this book tick.
The only thing I find necessary to add is that this book is also about your “found” family. It’s about how you can create a family from the friends and support you have around you, no matter how far afield you get from your blood relations.
It also manages to touch on independence, which specifically in the text of this novel is more about making decisions. And it is about Dorothy, a guardian angel-type figure who is prone to running you over with thoughtful chaos.
As Dorothy advises in the book, ‘We can none of us help where we came from, but we can decide where we’re going.’
So, I agree with Mrs. Agent Palmer: you should give this book a try. For those of you reading this review, consider yourself very far down a long list of people we’ve already recommended it to.