Unexpected Journey – My Book Review

DIRE’S CLUB

by Kimberly Packard

Publisher: Abalos Publishing

Publication Date: March 23, 2021

Pages: 326 Pages

Categories: Action & Adventure / Contemporary / Women’s Fiction

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Dying isn’t just hard on the ones left behind, the regret of unfinished lives weighs heavily on the terminally ill. That’s where Dire’s Club steps in, a specialty travel agency that takes a small group of dying people on one final adventure-so they can be free of guilt, be more than a diagnosis, and find a way to confront life…and death.

 

Life Coach Charlotte Claybrooke built a successful second career guiding people out of grief, but the impending tenth anniversary of her own heart-wrenching tragedy sets her on a journey to find life among the dying.

 

Staring death in the face was Jimmy Dire’s business. He met it with a warm hug, a kind word, and a smile. Dire’s Club gave the terminally ill one final, bucket-list adventure before passing on, but dying was expensive. The bills, like Jimmy’s lies, were piling up. It’s only a matter of time before he’s forced to face a different type of death.

 

A rock god, a telenovela star, a grandmother living her life-long dream, and a young tech genius round out this group of strangers facing death together. But when tragedy strikes, their bond is shattered. Lies and fraud surface, forcing the dying to come together to save someone’s life.

Everybody dies. The lucky ones have fun doing it.

 

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Dire’s Club trailer from Kimberly Walton on Vimeo.

Author Kimberly Packard at the end of Dire’s Club mentions to readers that this was a hard book to write for her. After finishing her book, I certainly empathize with her. Writing about death in any form is tough.

Dire’s Club took me on a journey I was not expecting. When you think you are going to read adventures about people’s last dying wishes, which you do with some of the characters, the story becomes a self-reflection of the main character, Charlotte. Charlotte has been dealing with the pain of tragically losing her fiancé. A pain that she carried for ten years that she could never deal with. So, yeah, she wanted to die with a group of people who were already dying from life’s tragic turns.

Depression is hard and takes its toll on people differently. What Dire’s Club does is takes readers on an emotional journey of a woman who was coping with her depression both outwardly and inwardly and beautifully. But it also takes readers on the emotional journeys of people who are actually dying who want to have one last grand adventure and memory before they die.

Even though the book is told with multiple narrations it does not slow the story down at all or even make the story disjointed. That is the genius of Dire’s Club and Packard’s writing.

From the cast of characters, Packard touches the soul with her character who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

“If I’m not ready for it today, I won’t be tomorrow. My memories are like leaves on a tree. It’s early autumn. Right now, I’m just dropping one or two, but winter will burst in and blow the rest of them away. I need to do this now, because I don’t know when the seasons will change.”  

The heart of Dire’s Club is the story that we all should be living our lives because we do not know what tomorrow brings for any of us.

“This was what death did. It destroyed the living. It took their plans; for tomorrow, for next month, for a lifetime, and it crushed it in its fist.”

Seriously, this book should give hope that somewhere out there is a company that actually helps people achieve one last dream before they die.  I mean what would you want to do if you knew if you were dying?

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