Sarah McCraw Crow

FictionFamily Drama

Florence Adler Swims Forever

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Rachel Beanland’s debut novel opens in 1934 Atlantic City. It’s a blue-sky June day, and most of the Adler family is enjoying the beach: 7-year-old Gussie; Gussie’s grandparents Esther and Joseph; Anna, the young German Jewish woman the family has taken in; and Florence, Esther and Joseph’s younger daughter, a Wellesley College student and star swimmer. Florence is such a competitive swimmer that she’s training to swim the English Channel later that summer. One family member who is not on the beach is Fannie, Florence’s older sister and Gussie’s mom, who is pregnant and in the hospital on bed rest, determined not to lose this baby as she lost the last one.

By the end of the day, the Adler family’s world has changed forever. Florence inexplicably drowns, and Esther decides that the family must keep this secret from Fannie, for fear that Fannie will go into early labor. There will be no funeral, no sitting shiva, no outer mourning for Florence.

But that’s not the only secret in this family novel. Each character has reasons to hide something important, which in turn affects their own happiness and relationships. The novel rotates through the perspectives of Gussie, Esther, Joseph, Anna, Fannie, Fannie’s husband and Florence’s devoted young swim coach, Stuart. It’s an ambitious balancing act that occasionally requires a little double-checking as to whose point of view we’re following. As the novel moves forward through the summer, the stress of secrets increases the pressure on each of the characters.

Florence Adler Swims Forever beautifully brings to life Atlantic City in the 1930s, offering the sights, sounds and smells of the beach and the boardwalk, as well as the daily life of Atlantic City’s Jewish community. It also foreshadows, through refugee Anna’s plight, the coming catastrophe of the Holocaust.

Beanland loosely based the novel on the story of her great-great-aunt Florence, who, like Florence Adler, was a competitive swimmer who drowned off the coast of Atlantic City. It’s a worthy tribute and a satisfying historical family drama.

Florence Adler Swims Forever beautifully brings to life Atlantic City in the 1930s, offering the sights, sounds and smells of the beach and the boardwalk, as well as the daily life of Atlantic City’s Jewish community.
NonfictionMemoir

The Madwoman and the Roomba

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In The Madwoman and the Roomba, Sandra Tsing Loh chronicles her 55th year, which feels “like living a disorganized twenty-five-year-old’s life in a malfunctioning eighty-five-year-old’s body.” As with her previous books The Madwoman in the Volvo and Mother on Fire, Loh finds comedy in the indignities and absurdities of contemporary life. These books make up a comic memoir in three parts: In the earlier books, Loh adjusted to motherhood and went through a rocky divorce, and this time, Loh is happily divorced and happily post-menopausal.

But she’s still recording her life with let-it-all-hang-out charm. She recalls her embarrassing claustrophobic freakout at the March for Science, and she tries to unleash her inner midlife goddess while parenting two teenagers. In the essay “Home Self-Care,” Loh writes, “The time has come. I can deny it no longer. My three-story 1906 Craftsman house has become a haunted-house-like eyesore.” She describes her efforts to improve her terrible front yard, hire a painter, understand her malfunctioning high-tech fridge and follow her new cookbook’s recipes.

Loh’s tone is breezy and self-deprecating—it’s like having a glass of wine or a long phone call with your witty, goofy friend. Because the narrative is loosely structured, you can read straight through or just dip into an essay when the mood strikes.

Something Loh doesn’t mention in The Madwoman and the Roomba is that she’s a Renaissance woman. She hosts two podcasts—the public radio podcast “The Loh Down on Science” (she holds a B.S. in physics from Cal Tech) and “The Loh Life,” her takes on life, family and pop culture. She’s performed in one-woman shows based on her writing, and she’s had bit parts in the TV show “The Office” and other productions. She’s also won a Pushcart Prize, published a novel and five other nonfiction books, and she’s written musical scores for an Oscar-winning documentary. I wish that Loh had riffed on her amazing jumble of a creative life, and how switching genres works, or doesn’t work, for her. But maybe that’s a wish for Loh to write another book.

In The Madwoman and the Roomba, Sandra Tsing Loh chronicles her 55th year, which feels “like living a disorganized twenty-five-year-old’s life in a malfunctioning eighty-five-year-old’s body.” As with her previous books The Madwoman in the Volvo and Mother on Fire, Loh finds comedy in the…

FictionLiterary Fiction

A Burning

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Megha Majumdar’s first novel follows three characters in contemporary urban India: Jivan, a 22-year-old Muslim woman who works at a clothing store, trying to raise her family out of poverty; Lovely, a transgender beggar woman whom Jivan tutored in English; and PT Sir, Jivan’s former gym teacher who’s sure he deserves more respect and improved middle-class creature comforts. 

A Burning opens the day after terrorists attack a commuter train. The attack has killed a hundred people and captured the nation’s attention and anger. Jivan, who saw the burning train cars and the people trapped inside (the train station is near Jivan’s home in the slums), dares to comment sarcastically on Facebook about the attack, equating the government with terrorists. Because of these posts, Jivan quickly becomes a suspect. Lovely and PT Sir, meanwhile, are preoccupied with their own ambitions. Lovely takes acting classes and aspires to get a role in a movie, and PT Sir stumbles into a campaign rally for an opposition politician and finds himself captivated. As PT Sir gets more involved with the campaign, he begins to do favors for the party and descends into corruption. 

The story rotates through the three characters’ points of view and occasionally the perspectives of other peripheral characters. The chapters are very short, sometimes only a page or two, giving the novel a fast-moving, staccato feel. 

A Burning touches on issues that complicate life in India today: Hindu-Muslim conflict, political corruption, the promises and failures of a political system, the pressures of extreme poverty, the drive to improve one’s lot in life. Majumdar knows this world well. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, she came to the U.S. to attend Harvard University. She also did graduate work in social anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. 

This challenging and distinctive novel is a lot to balance, but Majumdar’s writing stays grounded in these three characters’ voices and in their daily lives and hopes.

A Burning touches on issues that complicate life in India today: Hindu-Muslim conflict, political corruption, the promises and failures of a political system, the pressures of extreme poverty, the drive to improve one’s lot in life.
FictionPopular Fiction

The Book of V.

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Anna Solomon’s The Book of V. is painted on a much larger canvas than the author’s previous novels, each of which focused primarily on one place and time period—1880s Dakota Territory in The Little Bride and 1920s Gloucester, Massachusetts, in Leaving Lucy Pear.

The novel opens in 2016 with Lily, a 40-something Brooklyn wife and mom who’s grappling with the woman she has, and hasn’t, become. The narration then drops back to early-1970s Washington, D.C., where Vivian, or Vee, the young wife of a power-hungry senator, is about to host a party. Just as quickly, the story drops all the way back to ancient Persia, where 17-year-old Esther (yes, the biblical Esther) is about to be handed off to a Persian king who has done away with his first queen, Vashti, and now plans to select a new bride from his kingdom’s population of beautiful young virgins.

Solomon keeps these three stories moving as Lily, Vee and Esther find themselves in precarious situations. Lily second-guesses her marriage and contemplates an affair while trying to care for her sick mom, who doesn’t approve of Lily’s ambivalent style of feminism. Vee is cast out of her political life, with no clear path forward, while Esther is suddenly the queen of Persia and also under house arrest. Although the characters and their stories differ markedly from one another, Solomon’s omniscient narration serves as a lovely, wry guide.

The Book of V. offers plenty of thoughtful interiority while spinning a fast-moving story. Lily’s meditations on feminism, motherhood, friendship and middle-class striving will resonate with many readers. The novel’s unexpected retelling of the Esther story is imaginative yet, in its own way, faithful to the original.

In her acknowledgments, Solomon credits inspiration for the structure of her new novel to Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which also follows three different women in three different time periods. As with The Hours, The Book of V. connects its three characters’ stories not only thematically but also narratively, with a surprising yet inevitable and satisfying conclusion.

In her acknowledgments, Solomon credits inspiration for the structure of her new novel to Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which also follows three different women in three different time periods. As with The Hours, The Book of V connects its three characters’ stories not only thematically but also narratively, with a surprising yet inevitable and satisfying conclusion.

FictionFamily Drama

The Prettiest Star

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Carter Sickels’ The Prettiest Star imagines a difficult prodigal son homecoming. It’s 1986, and Brian Jackson has returned to his small southern Ohio hometown. Six years before, Brian left home for New York City, where he found friends, a measure of acceptance and love with his partner, Shawn. Now Brian is 24 and ill with late-stage AIDS. He’s also alone; Shawn has already died, isolated in a hospital ward. 

Brian’s family doesn’t know—or rather, they’ve chosen not to accept—that he is gay. The novel rotates through the first-person perspectives of Brian; his mom, Sharon; and his 14-year-old sister, Jess. Sharon is paralyzed, unable to figure out how to be a parent to Brian and remain a wife to Travis, who pretends that his son isn’t gay and isn’t sick. Observant Jess, who shares with her brother a love of whales and David Bowie songs, struggles to find her place in this changed world. And Brian narrates through a series of video recordings from the camera he carries with him, as Shawn asked, so those who die of AIDS won’t be forgotten. 

Soon, word of Brian’s return, along with the suspicion that he has AIDS, gets around town. Friends, strangers and their own extended family begin to shun Brian, Sharon, Travis and Jess, often in overtly hateful ways. 

Sickels does an excellent job showing the mix of panic, homophobia and bullying that AIDS once engendered. He also evokes the mid-1980s and rural small-town life with the right amount of period and place detail. Brian’s narration occasionally feels too composed and lyrical for a 24-year-old man talking into a camera, but that’s a small quibble.

While the story is bleak, it moves along at a clip, offering some surprises and a couple of unlikely, brave heroes. The Prettiest Star is a sensitive portrayal of a difficult time in our recent history.

Carter Sickels’ The Prettiest Star imagines a difficult prodigal son homecoming. It’s 1986, and Brian Jackson has returned to his small southern Ohio hometown. Six years before, Brian left home for New York City, where he found friends, a measure of acceptance and love with his partner, Shawn. Now Brian is 24 and ill with late-stage AIDS. He’s also alone; Shawn has already died, isolated in a hospital ward. 

FictionFamily Drama

A Good Neighborhood

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

A contemporary North Carolina suburb might seem an unlikely setting for Shakespearean tragedy. But that’s exactly what unfolds in Therese Anne Fowler’s A Good Neighborhood, whose first paragraph hints at what’s coming: “Later this summer when the funeral takes place, the media will speculate boldly on who’s to blame.”

A loose reworking of Romeo and Juliet, A Good Neighborhood opens on the day the Whitmans, a white family, move into the overly fancy house they’ve built in Oak Knoll, the “good neighborhood” of the title. Oak Knoll’s residents are proud of their trees, their progressive outlook and the neighborhood’s multiracial makeup.

Most dismayed by the Whitmans’ presence is next-door neighbor Valerie Alston-Holt, an ecology and forestry professor and mom to high school senior Xavier. Valerie is black; her husband and Xavier’s dad, who died when Xavier was a toddler, was white. Valerie is pretty sure that Brad and Julia Whitman are racist, but she’s also fixated on her magnificent prize oak tree, because the Whitmans, in building their trophy house, have disturbed the tree’s roots, and the tree is starting to die.

Meanwhile Xavier and Juniper, the Whitmans’ sheltered older daughter, fall for one another. They keep their romance secret, as Xavier knows how upset his mom would be, and Juniper took a purity pledge at 13—no dating, no boyfriends, no sex before marriage.

The story ticks forward through the summer, rotating through the viewpoints of Valerie, Brad and Julia, Xavier and Juniper. Throughout, a chorus of neighbors intrudes to speculate and offer background information, an intriguing mix of omniscient narration and gossipy lamentation. Although the transitions between the chorus and the other perspectives aren’t always seamless, this structure adds depth to the sense of Shakespearean tragedy.

A Good Neighborhood is fast-paced and thoughtful, and like Bruce Holsinger’s The Gifted School, it finds trouble in paradise, mapping the divisions among people who think of themselves as “good.”

A contemporary North Carolina suburb might seem an unlikely setting for Shakespearean tragedy. But that’s exactly what unfolds in Therese Anne Fowler’s A Good Neighborhood, whose first paragraph hints at what’s coming: “Later this summer when the funeral takes place, the media will speculate boldly on who’s to blame.”

FictionLiterary Fiction

Creatures

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

“There is a dead whale. It rolls idly in the warm shallows of this island, among cartoonish sea animals with tentacles, suction cups, and goopy eyes,” narrator Evangeline tells us in the opening of Crissy Van Meter’s debut novel, Creatures. “This island” is Winter Island, a fictional island off the Southern California coast that resembles Catalina Island, and where main character Evangeline, or Evie, has lived almost her whole life.

Winter Island is a place for summer people, fishermen, rock stars, druggies and other assorted ne’er-do-wells. It’s also a slightly wild place, with orcas and dolphins within sight, its dormant volcano, abandoned research buildings and frequent storms. As the novel opens, Evie is about to get married, her alcoholic dad has died, and after many years away, her mother has returned to Winter Island for the wedding. And now the dead whale in the harbor has made its smelly presence known to all.

The novel’s narrative follows a nonlinear, nonchronological structure, returning first to Evie’s peripatetic childhood and adolescence. Evie’s dad, a loving but flawed single parent, tries and fails repeatedly to quit drinking and doing drugs, which puts Evie and her dad at the mercy of friends and acquaintances. Sometimes they are homeless. The narrative then leaps forward to Evie’s married years, back to her youth, then forward to the wedding weekend. In between are short interludes that offer the feeling of lyrical essays. The novel’s structure is intriguing and unusual, but it can be hard to follow.

Creatures is filled with evocative writing, particularly in the descriptions of the natural landmarks familiar to Evie, which witness essential moments in her growing up. Likewise, Evie’s first-person narration is vivid and close, although some scenes, and some of the novel’s other characters, seem underdeveloped. For instance, I wanted more of a sense of Evie’s friend Rook and Rook’s son Tommy, and a clearer sense about Evie’s dad’s early death.

Still, with its beautiful writing and redemptive ending, Creatures is an imaginative, atmospheric debut.

Creatures is filled with evocative writing, particularly in the descriptions of the natural landmarks familiar to Evie, which witness essential moments in her growing up.
FictionHistorical Fiction

On Swift Horses

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

It’s 1956, and in the American West, military servicemen are returning from Korea and Japan looking for work, the fledgling interstate system is going up, and bomb tests draw Nevada tourists to watch the explosions. This is the backdrop for Shannon Pufahl’s assured debut, On Swift Horses, set in a time and place where the new and old rub up against each other, often uncomfortably. 

As the novel opens, Muriel has left her native Kansas for Southern California to join her new husband, Lee. Lee gets a factory job, and Muriel waits tables at the Heyday Lounge near the Del Mar race track. As she listens to the bar’s regulars, she picks up some insider horse-racing knowledge, which she chooses not to share with Lee. She also pines for Julius, Lee’s unruly younger brother. Julius, meanwhile, gambles and risks his life, first in California, then in Las Vegas and Tijuana, Mexico. 

As different as Muriel and Julius are, they both harbor secrets—one of which Muriel shares with Julius early in the story. And they’re both trying to find a way to love more truly and openly, since neither fits into the strictures that 1950s America wants to keep them in.

On Swift Horses offers many painful reminders of the damage that repression can do, but it’s also a deep-breathing, atmospheric novel. Pufahl renders postwar San Diego, the characters’ rural poverty and 1950s closeted gay life in careful detail, spinning plain language into beautiful images. Her prose carries hints of other writers who combine the bleak and the hopeful, such as Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner and Kent Haruf. While the novel’s middle drags a little, Muriel’s and Julius’ journeys are compelling and surprising. Pufahl is a novelist to watch.

It’s 1956, and in the American West, military servicemen are returning from Korea and Japan looking for work, the fledgling interstate system is going up, and bomb tests draw Nevada tourists to watch the explosions. This is the backdrop for Shannon Pufahl’s assured debut, On…

FictionPopular Fiction

The Nobodies

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

At 36, Joan Dixon sees herself as a complete failure. In the year since she lost her Los Angeles newspaper job, she’s had to move home with her parents and has just blown her last chance to sell the big story she’s been reporting. In desperation, she takes a copywriting job at Bloom, a tech startup where a 24-year-old will be her boss. That’s the setup for Liza Palmer’s latest novel, The Nobodies, which satirizes the tech industry’s affectations—its endless free food and drink, ridiculously young workforce and bro-y CEOs who believe their own nonsense.

Joan’s reporter’s instincts lead her to suspect that something’s off with Bloom’s business model. Joan makes friends with her young co-workers, and before long they’ve formed an investigative team. As they begin to pursue leads, Joan wonders if she’s leading them down a disastrous path.

Joan is stubborn, angry, self-deprecating and funny. Humor is a strength of the novel, and Joan’s first-person narration allows for lots of introspection, although it sometimes comes at the expense of the story and the development of the novel’s other characters. Joan’s co-workers fall in line with her investigative plan quickly, none of them giving more than a slight pushback, even though they stand to lose jobs and health insurance.

As I read The Nobodies, I thought of the HBO show “Silicon Valley,” for its funny, bumbling characters, and then “Younger,” whose main character connects with her 20-something publishing co-workers, and finally, The Inventor: Out for Blood, the documentary about the fraudulent tech startup Theranos. Combining elements from all of these narratives, The Nobodies is a fast-paced, contemporary novel with a main character who’s determined to get the real story and maybe find herself along the way.

At 36, Joan Dixon sees herself as a complete failure. In the year since she lost her Los Angeles newspaper job, she’s had to move home with her parents and has just blown her last chance to sell the big story she’s been reporting. In…

NonfictionTechnology

Because Internet

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Do you worry that the internet and its tools—social media, emojis, memes—are wrecking your kids’ spoken and written language? Or that the same thing might be happening to you? Gretchen McCulloch is here to reassure readers that no, future humans won’t communicate solely by emojis and GIFs. What’s more, the internet has made us all into writers, melding writing and informality. In Because Internet, McCulloch shows how internet language, like any other language, has evolved into its current form and how it continues to change. 

A Montreal-based internet linguist and columnist for Wired, McCulloch begins with a quick primer on linguistics, the study of language. “The continued evolution of language is neither the solution to all our problems nor the cause of them,” she writes. “It simply is. You never truly step into the same English twice.” Since the internet records what people post, tweet and share, it’s a good place to study recent changes in informal language. 

McCulloch is fascinating on emojis, those tiny digital smiley faces, hearts and flamenco dancers that we add to texts. Having studied emojis since 2014, she describes her research into the reasons that emojis caught on, showing why emojis and GIFs serve as gestures rather than as a new language. And McCulloch is convincingly reassuring about teen internet use. “Whether they’re spending hours on the landline telephone, racking up a massive texting bill, or being ‘addicted’ to Facebook or MySpace or Instagram, something that teens want to do in every generation is spend a lot of unstructured time hanging out, flirting, and jockeying for status with their peers.” 

Although the concept of internet linguistics might sound dry, McCulloch takes a sprightly approach. She’s funny as well as informative. Because Internet just might lead you to see the internet, and how you (and your kids) use it, in a whole new way. 

A Montreal-based internet linguist and columnist for Wired, McCulloch begins with a quick primer on linguistics, the study of language. “The continued evolution of language is neither the solution to all our problems nor the cause of them,” she writes. “It simply is. You never truly step into the same English twice.” Since the internet records what people post, tweet and share, it’s a good place to study recent changes in informal language. 

FictionComing of Age

Marilou Is Everywhere

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In Sarah Elaine Smith’s debut novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, main character Cindy Stoat is almost 14, an observant and lonely teen in northern Appalachia whose mom has left home for a job without saying when she’s coming back. Parentless, Cindy and her two older brothers, Virgil and Clinton, cobble together a life, eating canned food and bathing once in a while in a nearby retaining pond. That might seem enough for a coming-of-age novel, but an outside event—the disappearance of Jude Vanderjohn, a more glamorous and privileged teen—sets the story in motion. Not long ago, Jude went out with Virgil, and now Virgil feels compelled to help out Jude’s unhinged mother, Bernadette, who can’t accept that her daughter is missing. Cindy tags along with Virgil, and before long she’s found a way out of her own sad house and into Bernadette’s. Because Bernadette’s memory is shot, she accepts Cindy’s growing presence in her house, at least some of the time.

It’s a compelling premise for a suspenseful novel, and short chapters keep the story moving, as Cindy makes a choice that harms others. But Smith isn’t solely interested in plot; she’s a poet as well as a fiction writer (she holds two MFAs, one fiction and another in poetry), and her interest in language shows. “Dark came on earlier,” Cindy remembers, midway through the novel. “The blue light had a glassy depth to it. Bernadette said it was the hours before the moon rose that made the color reverberate in its vaulted bowl over us. The first stars were scrawled in, and Virgil was late getting me.” Marilou Is Everywhere’s language mixes the inventive with the plain, which adds another dimension to the first-person narration, making Cindy’s lonely world more vivid.

Smith handles the darkness in the novel (rural poverty, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug use, neglect) with a light touch, offering plenty of humor in Cindy’s narration. The story comes to a lovely conclusion, allowing Cindy and the novel’s other characters some redemption.

Smith is a writer to watch.

Debut novelist Sarah Elaine Smith handles the darkness in the novel (rural poverty, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug use, neglect) with a light touch, offering plenty of humor.
FictionFamily Drama

The Gifted School

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Bruce Holsinger is an English professor at the University of Virginia, a medievalist whose first two novels were set in 14th-century London. With his new novel, Holsinger has moved forward seven centuries and across an ocean. The Gifted School is a contemporary story about high-stakes parenting, set in an affluent Colorado suburb.

The novel’s four moms—Rose, Azra, Samantha and Lauren—have been best friends for a decade. Together, they’ve weathered death, divorce, addiction and travel-team sports. When they learn that a charter school for gifted middle and high schoolers will open in Crystal (a fictionalized Boulder), they respond with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But before long, they’re caught up in the school’s competitive admissions process, each trying to find a hook for her kid.

Although the novel’s point of view shifts with each chapter, Holsinger has made an interesting and smart decision to offer the perspective of only one of the four moms. That’s Rose, an ambitious neurologist who’s exasperated with her husband, Gareth, an underachieving novelist. Other point-of-view characters include Beck, the soccer dad ex-husband of Azra, and Ch’ayña, an immigrant grandmother who cleans houses. We also get the perspectives of three kids: Emma Z., daughter of Samantha, the most affluent mom; Xander, an 11-year-old chess whiz on the autism spectrum; and Tessa, Xander’s troubled 16-year-old sister.

Yes, it’s a lot of characters to keep track of. But the novel’s frequent perspective shifting, interspersed with faux newspaper articles, texts, Facebook posts and video narration, keeps the story moving through the months leading up to the gifted school’s opening. As the story unfolds, we learn that most of the characters harbor secrets, not all of them having to do with parental ambition. These secrets, compounded by a devastating project undertaken by one of the kids, are revealed in the novel’s climactic final act at the school’s open house. An astute reader may predict part of the outcome, but the story still offers satisfying surprises.

Reminiscent of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, The Gifted School is a story of trouble in paradise with timely commentary on hyperparenting and the lengths to which parents will go to ensure that their kids remain “exceptional.”

Reminiscent of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, The Gifted School is a story of trouble in paradise with timely commentary on hyperparenting and the lengths to which parents will go to ensure that their kids remain “exceptional.”
FictionPopular Fiction

Mrs. Everything

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

At the outset, Jennifer Weiner’s new novel, Mrs. Everything, pays homage to Little Women: Older sister Jo, a tomboy and athlete, wants to be a writer, while younger sister Bethie just wants to be a sweet, pretty daughter. But in Alcott terms, these two sisters are more like Jo and Amy: They scrap, they fail to understand each other, and sometimes they just don’t get along.

Told by turns in Jo’s voice and then Bethie’s, Mrs. Everything follows the two sisters from their Jewish girlhood in post-World War II Detroit right on through the present and into the near future, 71 years in all. The cultural changes of the 1960s and ’70s—civil rights, the antiwar movement, gay rights, the women’s movement and more—roll over Jo and Bethie, changing them as each struggles to find her way, and as they sometimes rescue or betray each other.

Jo and Bethie reverse their roles multiple times, so that what the reader expects from the novel’s opening chapters is not what follows. The novel is especially strong during Jo’s observations on race relations and the way even well-intentioned white people can thoughtlessly enforce institutionalized racism.

With its long timespan and its focus on cultural change, Mrs. Everything is a departure for Weiner, a founding godmother of fun, fluffy, women-centric popular fiction. In its period details, Mrs. Everything is a little reminiscent of Judy Blume’s In the Unlikely Event, and in themes reminiscent of Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion. Some of Weiner’s previous novels have taken on difficult social issues like prescription drug abuse, and Mrs. Everything’s flawed but approachable female characters, well-examined friendships and romantic relationships and often-joyful sex scenes make this vintage Weiner.

Because the novel covers so much time and ground, some details and secondary characters are skated over, and some sections feel rushed. Still, this is a warm, readable novel about figuring out what it means for a woman to be true to herself, and then figuring out how to act on that knowledge.

At the outset, Jennifer Weiner’s new novel, Mrs. Everything, pays homage to Little Women: Older sister Jo, a tomboy and athlete, wants to be a writer, while younger sister Bethie just wants to be a sweet, pretty daughter. But in Alcott terms, these two sisters are more like Jo and Amy: They scrap, they fail to understand each other, and sometimes they just don’t get along.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features