In RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, CALLIE KINGMAN, Alli Frank and Asha Youmans combine their considerable talents to bring us the eponymous main character. Callie Kingman is living in Sacramento, California, after giving up her career and her family to move across the country to follow her husband, Thomas, for his career.

Callie’s present life is not going well. When Thomas returns from a work trip, he informs her that he wants a divorce. He’s cruel about it, telling her that it's because she's boring and she's let herself go. He's fallen for someone else; he and his new love will be living in London and building a new life and family there together. "New" is the operative word as 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 is overweight, drinks too much, smokes, has a terrible diet, and is heading for an early grave if major adjustments aren’t made. That shakes her up, and she vows to start living healthier.

However, it's easier said than done, as many of us know. Callie gets some unexpected help when she almost runs over a jogger. Through a series of unlikely meetings, she 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.

"The writing is fabulous. There's wit, humor and strong emotions.... It's Callie's desire to change her life and the choices she makes that result in this inspiring and book club-worthy novel."

Through alternating flashbacks, we also learn about Callie's college years at Princeton. She and her roommate during freshman year, Quinn, became best friends and were inseparable. They were joined by their boyfriends, Porter and Charles, who also were students there. Callie and Porter were madly in love, and she assumed that they'd spend their lives together.

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

Something has to 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 healthier --- she begins 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 he told her (without discussing it with her) that they were moving. In essence, it was because his career and ambitions were more important than hers.

Now Callie is determined to regain control of her life, no matter what. And when fate throws her a few more curve balls, she must decide if she's strong enough to make her professional dreams come true or if staying in California (even with good reason) is better.

Women of a certain age love reading books about other women at that age. Callie may not be ready for retirement, but she is past her childbearing years and 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 50 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, humor and strong emotions. We really enjoy watching Callie during her beautiful and hectic college years. Yes, she comes from privilege, but she doesn't flaunt it. We can empathize with Callie when her life hits rock bottom and she has tough decisions to make. She's a wonderful protagonist, and Frank and Youmans have imbued her not only with positive traits like determination, intelligence and humor, but also with faults that are practically universal: feelings of insecurity, laziness and depression. She is not a perfect person.

It's Callie's desire 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, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, CALLIE KINGMAN is a love story, but not a romance. It's about how we must love ourselves before we can love others. 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 and her mother all love her. But will that be enough for Callie?