The Last Letters of Sally and Walter by Cammie McGovern ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

A heartwarming story of a curmudgeon and a newcomer who strike up an unlikely friendship over cutthroat Scrabble at their retirement home, outrageously starting something new in their golden eras.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site.  A free book was provided for an honest review.

April 2026; Sourcebooks Landmark; 978-1464246425
audio, ebook, print (384 pages); romance

I really enjoy reading books about older people who find love.  Too many authors and readers seem to think that the only people who fall in love are people in their 20s and 30s.  It’s a much better story for me to find people with lots of baggage from their younger days that they need to get rid of to start over again with someone new.

Sally is in her 70s and has just moved to Golden Grove, an independent living community.  She is hiding a secret about her health and trying to make the best of the rest of her life because when she thinks about it, she’s convinced that she was a bad wife and a poor mother.  There are lots of unwritten rules at Golden Grove – like only going to one activity a day and eating with different people in the dining room each evening.  She’s kind of bored with some of the activities, so when she sees a flyer for a Scrabble group, she’s excited to give it a try.  When she arrives at the meeting, she’s surprised to see only one person there – Walter.  

He had been at Golden Grove for about a year and hadn’t made many friends.  He started the Scrabble club, but his need to win and not change any rules made everyone quit attending meetings.  Walter and Sally play a game of Scrabble, and he finds out that she’s really interested in learning the game and is actually a prodigy.  He convinces her to give Scrabble tournaments a try, and she excels.  

More importantly, the more time that they spend with each other, the closer they become.  They’ve each found their person – someone that they could talk to about their failures as spouses, parents, and life in general.  Walter had a son that he had never been close to, and Sally had two children who were still trying to find their places in life despite being in their 40’s.  When Walter finds out Sally’s secret for moving to Golden Grove, he realizes that he wants to take care of her and wants them to spend the rest of their lives together.  Walter has a major health scare, which makes Sally realize how much he means to her and that she thinks of him as much more than a friend.  Will they be able to take the next step in their relationship??

I loved the main characters in this book – Walter and Sally were both people who had little self-confidence in their own lives, but together they could face all of life’s problems.  Their health issues were scary and life-changing, but the strength that they gave to each other was amazing.  This was my first book by this author, and I look forward to reading some of her older titles.

As one final note – I’ve played Scrabble my whole life against a mom who was a ruthless play-to-win opponent, so I really enjoyed all of the Scrabble talk in the book.  I had no idea that it was such a competitive game and that there were nationwide tournaments.  I also learned a few good hints about the game that I wish I’d have known back when my mom and I played.   Overall, this was a fun book with a lot of serious overtones about aging and finding happiness late in life.  Loved it!

“The hardest part of aging. she once thought, wasn’t the battle to retain your abilities, it was the absence of a chance to develop new ones.” (p 44)

Buy The Last Letters of Sally and Walter at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is three hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.

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