Some love stories are defined by the moment two people meet. Others by what comes after, even when they are forced apart, and there is this lingering, unseen weight to it. In Under the Banyan Tree, Lenore McKelvey Puhek looks closely at that second kind, with a tender tale of wartime romance, remembrance, sorrow, and a surprising, hesitant chance at starting again. The book sits partly in the beauty of Hawaii, and it follows two people whose lives end up moving into different lanes after the war pulls them away. Still, their memories keep showing up, refusing to vanish, not even when everything else does.
In the middle are Patricia Dougherty and Michael McCarthy. Patricia is an Army nurse stationed at Tripler Army Medical Hospital in Hawaii when she meets Michael, an injured sailor. Their situation is not exactly romance friendly. They are living in a world framed by military duty and uncertainty, where love can be paused by orders, distance, or plain events none of them can manage. And still, they fall in love.
Then the war, well it separates them. Patricia ends up back in Helena, Montana, and somehow, she starts to follow the life people expected for that sort of chapter. She marries, keeps up her nursing career, brings up her family, and just moves through the years. Michael does the same in his own way too, he builds a life elsewhere, and later he becomes a successful businessman. And still, neither of them ever really lets the other go, not all the way.
A Romance About the Life Between
That detail gives Under the Banyan Tree its emotional base, like, it just sort of sticks with you. Puhek is not only curious about if two former lovers will reunite. The more daring question is what it means to meet someone who once belonged to an earlier version of yourself, after an entire lifetime has already passed.
Patricia is eventually left widowed. Michael, similarly, also loses his spouse. When Patricia comes back to Hawaii for a vacation, the island turns into the stage for something neither of them could honestly have predicted. On a late-night stroll along Waikiki Beach, recognition arrives. Not gently either. And then, the past is suddenly not fully past anymore.
There is a real romantic appeal to the idea, especially because Puhek lets time itself become part of the love story. Patricia and Michael cannot simply pick up where they stopped. They are not the young Army nurse and the injured sailor anymore, not even close. They have loved other people. They have lived through marriages, careers, family ties, grief, duties, and decades of change and well, it adds up. A second chance therefore means accepting not only the person one remembers, but the person that life has shaped, re-made.
The Question of Second Chances
Many romances end right at the start: two people bump into their obstacles, they manage, then suddenly everyone says how they feel, and the reader gets to picture what comes after. Under the Banyan Tree turns that pattern around, a bit. Patricia and Michael have already done much of “the rest.” Their reunion makes you wonder if romantic possibility is only for the young, or if love can stay vivid even after decades of separate lives and lessons.
Because of that, the novel feels especially inviting as a mature romance. There is a quietly optimistic edge to watching characters who have both joy and grief behind them, discover that life might still have another little twist waiting. One does not need the other to wipe away what they already made. Their earlier marriages count. Their losses count. New love, in this story, does not cancel the old. Puhek presents the heart as something that can keep memory while still leaving space, for a fresh beginning.
Hawaii as Memory and Possibility
Hawaii feels especially right as the setting because it ties Patricia and Michael’s past together with what is happening now, in a way that, also, stays with you. For Patricia, coming back to the islands means stepping into a scenery full of echoes, of who she used to be. Waikiki Beach, the tropical air, and even the banyan tree help create this almost timeless mood where memory and reality can overlap for a moment, like a brief misunderstanding that turns sweet.
The novel also leans into that “island magic” feeling, so the reunion gets an added romantic edge. People reading do not have to take it as literal. Fate, coincidence, remembering, and longing can feel like enchantment when two lives end up meeting again after decades, with no warning.
And the banyan tree itself works as a solid symbol. Those wide branches and deep roots imply persistence, togetherness, and living things that keep expanding in surprising directions. Patricia and Michael, they have done that. Their routes moved away, grew in separate directions, and then, later, looped back toward each other once more.
Love After Loss
The emotional force of Under the Banyan Tree seems to rest on its understanding that romance after midlife comes with different stakes, you know. Like not the first bloom feeling, but something steadier, more complicated, maybe a little more careful. Patricia and Michael aren’t stumbling into love for the first time. They already know what relationships demand, and they have a clearer sense of how quickly everything can shift in real life. Their getting back together then has this mix of energy, and prudence, both happening at once.
Still, the book keeps asking, can memory really survive when it meets the present, the actual world? Can the person they once loved, decades earlier, be loved again as the person they became later? And maybe most quietly, but most importantly, can two individuals allow themselves to chase happiness again after grief?
Puhek’s story invites readers to sit with those questions, but it also keeps the warmth intact, the same warmth that makes second-chance romance keep working, over and over, for people. Yes, there’s nostalgia in it, and you feel it, but the heart of the novel is actually looking ahead. Remembering matters only because Patricia and Michael must decide what to do with the right now, not with a yesterday that won’t listen.
The Verdict
Under the Banyan Tree feels warm and oddly sentimental, like love getting interrupted by history, then, later, somehow pushed back into view by circumstance. Lenore McKelvey Puhek lays out her plot on a widely felt premise: what if the person you never really managed to forget had never really let go of you either? It is hard to resist that question.
The war time start for Patricia and Michael gives their connection a heavier historical backbone, while the later meeting, yes that reunion, turns the whole thing more meditative than a typical love story. It is about first love, but also about getting older, memory that wobbles, grief with its own rhythm, family, and the nerve you need to keep believing that joy does not come with an expiration date.
If you are hunting for a cynical romance, you will not get it. Puhek leans into sincerity, coincidence, nostalgia, and even the idea that destiny may have been waiting somewhere off stage. And for readers willing to step into that emotional territory, those elements are exactly the book’s charm, not a distraction.
Because, sometimes the grand love story of someone’s life doesn’t move in a straight line, not really. Sometimes two people meet. Sometimes history pushes them apart. Sometimes whole lives happen in between, quietly. And sometimes, down under the Hawaiian night sky, the road finds its way back, to the place where the heart first started.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Recommended for: Readers of second-chance romance, mature love stories, wartime romance, women’s fiction, nostalgic historical fiction, and heartfelt stories about love after loss.