Vera Stein Is Fine

By: Murphy, Julie

From #1 New York Times bestseller Julie Murphy comes a heartfelt and hilarious tale of a woman who thinks life and love have passed her by until she's thrown into her grandmother's quirky world of octogenarian free love and gets a second chance with the one man she never expected to see again. Perhaps it's never too late to play the opening credits...

Welcome to Starlight Palms, a favorite retirement facility among Hollywood actors and industry professionals tucked away just outside of sunny Palm Springs. Filled with forgotten scream queens, eccentric screenwriters, and heartthrobs of the past, it has a brand-new resident: Vera Stein, age forty.

Vera knows she's missed her chance at a life worthy of the silver screen, just like she missed her chance at ever finding true love. But Vera isn't one to take chances. She's spent most of her adult years caretaking for her dying mother and her movie star boss's ego. Now abruptly houseless and jobless, Vera has nowhere to land, so to grandmother's house we go

The Starlight Palms Senior Living Center is midcentury Hollywood down to its pastel-painted bones. This desert gem isn't lacking in saucy plot twists (swinging seniors, anyone?) or a leading man: Elias Buckley, the on-site doctor and Vera's former ill-fated college fling and--for reasons that will stay in Vegas--legally her ex-husband according to the state of Nevada.

It's not long before Vera falls into a job as the activities coordinator and under the spell of a certain smart-mouthed doctor... Suddenly all those empty years in LA look less like mistakes and a lot more like backstory. With a fresh start at her fingertips, Vera begins to see that even with all the detours she's taken, there's still a Hollywood ending (and maybe even a happily ever after) in sight...

TROPES

Second Chance RomanceWorkplace RomanceMultigenerational Family DramaForced ProximityNew Lease on Life and Spice

• Format: MP3 CD
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GYFXJKHB
• ISBN13: 9798228977969
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Length: 1 Pages

Customer Reviews

A definite read.

As a prolific reader, I go through a lot of books a month. Many are just fun quick reads that help calm my busy mind. Cute and enjoyable but forgetful stories as they are very formulaic stories that even though I like them, they blur together somewhat in their similarities. This is NOT one of those books. It’s humors as it’s sweet and at times makes your heart twist a bit in both good and bad ways… tough ways. We have a female lead who has lost her mom, and her home as her grandmother sells it to move to a senior living community. Then leaves her job and needs a job and place to live. She deals with those tough circumstances then to realize a man from her past now works at the facility as the geriatric doctor in residence. That causes even more emotions to stir up than she was already dealing with. So forty and trying to get her live together after always taking care of everyone else and showing little for it. The journey we go on with her is a lot of emotion and mental growth with a lot of humor and incredible characters. So many times I laughed out loud and smiled while listening to the narration. I could easily put myself in the shoes of Vera and understand exactly what she was feeling/thinking. Completely relatable and not the usual “happy go lucky” or “a man in my life will solve everything” storyline. I loved that. Loved loved how the book was read also. The female narrator just gives so much emotion and feeling that made you feel like she was into this book with you. Really liked and would recommend to anyone wanting something a bit more realistic, but that will still leave you with warm fuzzies. Arc read