In “Run for Your Life, Callie Kingman,” authors Alli Frank and Asha Youmans combine their considerable talents to bring us the eponymous main character, Callie Kingman. Callie is currently living in Sacramento, California, after giving up her career and her family to move across the country to follow her husband for his career.

Her present life is not going well. When her husband returns from a work trip, he informs her that he wants a divorce. He’s cruel about it and tells her that it’s because she’s boring and she’s let herself go. He’s in love with someone else, and he and his new love will be living in London and building a new life and a new family there, together. “New” being the operative word; Callie represents “old.”

Meanwhile, Callie visits her doctor for a checkup and is told, in no uncertain terms, that she needs to change her lifestyle or things will not go well. She’s overweight, drinks too much, smokes, has a terrible diet, and is heading for an early grave if things don’t change. That shakes Callie up, and she vows to start living healthier.

But it’s easier said than done, as many of us know. Callie gets some unexpected help when she almost runs over a jogger, and through a series of unlikely meetings, ends up joining his running club. Her incentive is that she will be seeing her soon-to-be-ex husband at the wedding of her goddaughter, her college best friend’s daughter, in New York. She wants to show him how good she can look.

But through alternating flashbacks, we also learn about Callie’s college years at Princeton. Her roommate freshman year, Quinn, and Callie became best friends and were inseparable all four years there. They were joined by their boyfriends, also Princeton students, Charles and Porter, respectively. Callie and Porter were madly in love, and she assumed they’d spend their lives together.

But life doesn’t always go as planned, and we know that Callie married Thomas, and in retrospect, it was a poor choice. He moved her away from her beloved New York, where she had her life and her career planned. In Sacramento, she raised their two sons, but became a housewife and mother, and let her dreams fade and then disappear.

Now, something’s gotta change. And it seems that the universe is conspiring to make that happen. When Callie joins the running club, and once she stops drinking and smoking, and starts eating better, she starts thinking beyond just looking better. There’s a lot she missed out on, and while her husband promised that the move to California would be temporary, and she’d be back in New York in just a few years, it never happened. Her promising career as a journalist was put on hold when her husband told her — didn’t consult her and discuss it — that they were moving. In essence, because his career was more important than hers. That his life and his dreams were more important than hers.

Now Callie is determined to get back control of her life. No matter what. And when fate throws her a few more curve balls, Callie must decide whether she’s strong enough to make her professional dreams come true or whether staying in California, even with good reason, is better.

Women of a certain age love reading books about other women at that age. And Callie may not be ready for retirement, but she’s past her childbearing years and she feels like her life is over. But ultimately, what she finds out, and what we love seeing in our fiction and our real life, is that women who hit fifty are smarter, more capable, and really good at getting things done after a life filled with all kinds of challenges. Callie is ready to live her dream life, and she knows what she wants.

The writing is fabulous; there’s wit, there’s humor, there are strong emotions. We really enjoy watching Callie during her beautiful and hectic college years. Yes, Callie comes from privilege, but she doesn’t flaunt it. And we can really empathize with Callie when her life hits rock bottom and she has tough decisions to make. She’s a wonderful main character, and Frank and Youmans have imbued her with not only positive traits like determination, intelligence, and humor, but also with faults that are practically universal: feelings of insecurity, laziness, depression. Callie is not a perfect person.

It’s Callie’s determination to change her life and the choices she makes that result in this inspiring and book-club-worthy novel. There are twists that Callie never considered as a young woman that we see in hindsight, things that are crystal clear when we look back. At heart, this novel is a love story, but not a romance. It’s a love story about how before loving others, we must love ourselves. What we see is that Callie’s life is filled with love of all kinds, even when her husband leaves her. Her best friend, her new running friends, her sons, her mother, all love Callie. But will that be enough for Callie?

This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.