Review: ‘The Rest of Our Lives’ by Dan Stone

When it’s successful, humorous writing looks so effortless that we forget how much effort goes into it. There is a subjective element to humor that makes it very, very difficult to pull off on the page. Is the author as amusing as he thinks he is?

Happily, Dan Stone’s novel The Rest of Our Lives is genuinely funny. Two male witches, the opposite of each other in many ways, meet and fall in love, only to discover that their love affair is centuries old. They met in previous lifetimes, sometimes as a mixed-sex couple; and their love didn’t always—well, didn’t ever work out.

This premise has a screwball edge to it—see René Clair’s I Married a Witch. And as in a classic screwball comedy, there is true romance here. Maintaining an even, light touch throughout, Stone delivers scenes of steamy love and hand-wringing angst that carry the reader along like a breeze. His narrator, Colm, is especially winning; he has the native wisdom and dicey self-esteem of a protagonist from a Stephen Macaulay novel.

Stone gives no hint of a sequel, but I wouldn’t mind meeting these characters again. And again. And again….