Many years ago, certainly predating this blog, I read Elizabeth Berg’s novel Joy School and found it to be a beautiful and heartbreaking book about a young girl trying to find her place in her family and falling in love with a young mechanic who is, of course, too old for her but who treats her heart like the precious thing that it is.

Never Change is the story of Myra Lipinski, a middle aged unmarried visiting nurse who lives a quiet life with her dog, Frank.

You know people like me. I’m the one who sat on a folding chair out in the hall with a cigar box on my lap, selling tickets to the prom, but never going — even though in the late sixties only nerds went to proms. But I would have gone. I would have happily gone; I would have been so happy.

Myra has always felt like an outsider, even though the pretty girls at school would call her to talk about things that were serious because Myra “knew how to listen.” Even in her own home, Myra felt other. She was not a pretty child, her face “unfortunate, with its too small eyes, its too wide mouth. The hair mousy brown, too thin and straight, greasy after half a day, no matter what.”

Myra is a good nurse though – efficient, kind and well liked by her clients, a motley crew including a teenage mother, a bickering elderly couple, and a man with a gunshot wound who lives in a part of town no one else will visit. Then, a new name is added to her roster: Chip Reardon.

Chip and Myra went to high school together and although they were friendly, they weren’t exactly friends. Chip was “Every girl’s dream boy. The handsome star athlete with a good head on his shoulder’s too. And a genuinely nice guy.” Now he’s back in their home town living with his parents because he has a brain tumour and his clock is running out.

Never Change is the story of how this reunion cracks Myra’s life open in unexpected ways. Opposite to what the title suggests, Myra does change. She opens up to people, including Chip, and allows people to love her, also including Chip.

This is a lovely, albeit sad, story of how sometimes our blinders prevent letting people into our lives in a meaningful way. We don’t always see ourselves as others see us. This is a quiet book and I very much enjoyed my time with these characters.