MEETING NEW PEOPLE – Daniel M. Lavery

Have you ever read a book that is so well-written that it makes you absolutely angry that you don’t like it?  That’s me with Daniel M. Lavery’s Meeting New People (HarperVIA 2026). He is such a talented writer – just so smart and so funny – but I couldn’t bring myself to like it. Why not?  Because I hated Barbara. My feelings for this novel (and Barbara) reminded me quite a bit of Elizabeth Strout and her Lucy Barton.  Strout is also a phenomenal writer, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about Lucy.  I think Lucy and Barbara would be good friends – they are cut from such a similar cloth.  I do not want spend any length of time with them.

Twice-divorced Barbara has recently been broken up with by her best friend, and she’s not sure why.  This leads to her wondering about her prior friendships, and why she seems incapable of keeping a female friend.  (She’s less concerned about  keeping the husbands.)  It’s well written and Lavery is a sharp storyteller, but I was so glad to reach the last page.

I will say, do not read this book on an empty stomach.  There’s so much food, and it all sounds so good.

THE YOUNG WILL REMEMBER – Eve J. Chung

“I am in such despair that everything looks like a noose. But then I remember that I cannot leave, or you will have no home to return to. And so I stay.”

Eve J. Chung’s The Young Will Remember (Berkley 2026) is a captivating historical fiction novel that takes a deep dive into the humanity on both sides of a war and motherhood, echoing with the resounding truth that we are far more alike than we will ever be different. The novel is well written, with sections broken up by letters and telegrams about the ongoing conflict, and it keeps a nice pace.  And the plot is just… I loved it.

Ellie Chang is a Chinese American journalist covering the Korean war.  She doesn’t speak Korean, but she speaks Mandarin and Japanese, which she uses to advance her career. While on a military flight, her plane is shot down over North Korea. Enemy soldiers surround the plane when a woman starts screaming in Korean. It’s a case of mistaken identity – grief has convinced the woman that Ellie is her daughter who had been taken by the Japanese years earlier. In the confusion, the soldiers let her go with the woman. Once it becomes clear she’s not the woman’s daughter, they forge a friendship; Ellie will help her look for her daughter, and she will help Ellie get back to the Americans and safety.  Meanwhile, a war continues to rage around them and Ellie is very much in enemy territory. But how are these people her enemies?

Chung does not gloss over the horrors of war or of the previous Japanese occupation and the stolen girls who were forced into sexual slavery as “comfort women.”  The geopolitical aspects of this novel are so well done within the captivating historical framework.  I read a review that said the novel is “Kristin Hannah meets Pachinko.”  It’s an unpopular opinion to say I don’t care for Kristin Hannah because I think she writes trauma porn, so I won’t make the comparison here. I did love Pachinko though.  Th Young Will Remember is fantastic historical fiction that doesn’t rely on trauma for trauma’s sake.

Read this book.

RETURNS AND EXCHANGES – Kayla Rae Whitaker

Kayla Rae Whitaker’s Returns and Exchanges (Random House 2026) is likely going to wind up in my top five reads of the year – most definitely in the top ten. Spanning 1979-2015, the novel follows one Kentucky family – a rags to riches to reckoning story of resilience and risking it all to be seen, all carried on the back of the family matriarch, Fran Taylor (née Baker).

When Fran is 16, she runs from her home (and brothers) without looking back, joining her sister, Luce, who clawed her own way out of their home and into a better life.  Fran drags Fred along with her, and they get married.  Under Fran’s guidance (and with Luce’s money and some other investors), they build an empire with their chain of discount stores, Baker-Taylor’s. The novel opens with them on the precipice of an expansion like they never would have imagined. Fran makes the company what it is, and Fred just basks in the glory of it all.

Fran and Fred have four living children. Sam and Josiah grew up before the money started rolling. Benny and Birdie have few memories of those years; their childhoods were marked with glitz, glam and money.

As the novel moves forward, different POVs provide the rise and fall of the family. It starts with Fran, who has done everything for the stores, her husband, and her children. And she is exhausted.  When she goes to one of their stores for a meeting with a derelict GM, she meets one of their employees, Wendy. Fran is instantly smitten with the woman, and she is confused and fascinated by her feelings. That chance encounter marks the beginning of the end of Baker-Taylor’s, though it will take years for the empire to crumble.  But it also marks the beginning of Fran.

I loved this family, except for Fred, and I was sat to see how their lives would play out. It’s a family saga, so it’s going to sting, but what a beautiful family saga it is.  Even Fred gets somewhat of a redemption – because no one person is all bad or all good, we’re all grey.

Read this book.

AFTERNOON HOURS OF A HERMIT – Patrick Cottrell

Patrick Cottrell’s Afternoon Hours of a Hermit ( ECCO 2026) comes with some pretty hefty blurbs – Bryan Washington, Katie Kitamura and Rita Bullwinkle to hit the Booker and NBA names – and I can see why; the novel has that “je ne sais quoi” that makes it smell “Bookery.” It’s a noir detective novel, a study in grief, an existential dark comedy, a family saga, a comedy of manners, and it’s all wrapped up in the trappings of metafiction. Oh, and there’s an insanely unreliable first-person narrator in Dan Moran, and we know Booker loves that.

Dan is trans author. He is one of three adopted Koreans who are raised as siblings. The younger sibling, Kevin, died by suicide five years prior. Dan is returning home where most knew him pre-transition and refer to him by his dead name. The dead name appears in the novel simply as a blank.

The relationships between Dan and his parents and Dan and his surviving brother are interesting because we only see them from Dan’s POV – and that POV is not favorable. We know Dan wrote about his brother’s suicide and his family. We know he intentionally excluded his surviving brother from that narrative. We know no one in his family has read the novel. Through dialogue and context, we realize these memorial dinners have been happening with regularity.  We also learn that Dan is not “no contact” but very close to it, especially with the surviving brother who certainly crossed lines and possibly committed crimes when Dan was female-presenting. 

Dan has returned home after receiving an anon package that contained a picture of his brother. He’s decided to investigate his brother’s suicide for his upcoming novel, a psychological thriller. And he just drags us along, his madness and grief and self-importance roaring on each page.

The prose is lovely, but this one just didn’t work for me.

A BEAUTIFUL LOAN – Mary Costello

“How to understand why we do what we do, or tolerate what we tolerate, or love who we love.”

Named for a concept from the Quran where giving charity or lending to others for the sake of Allah is described as a beautiful loan (Christianity and Judaism have similar concepts), Mary Costello’s A Beautiful Loan (W.W. Norton 2026) is a beautiful book about a woman who is either a true chameleon, a doormat, or Camus’s Meursault. Had the novel been any longer, my patience for our narrator would have snapped.

When Anna Hughes is 19, she meets the much older Peter Gallagher at a pub. When he speaks Irish to her, she is immediately smitten.  She quickly becomes obsessed with the older man, molding herself to be what he wants and allowing him to treat her like trash. He tells her he loves her one single time in a relationship that spans over two decades. I hate him.

Later, she meets Karim. She fancies herself in love with him, a connection forged because she loves Camus, and they are both from Algeria.  She molds herself again, converting to Islam to connect with him more. He’s not as bad as Peter, but I can’t say he is a prize either.

In the blink of an eye, 25 years have passed and Anna is reminiscing as to how she ended up where she has.

The writing is poetic and beautiful, haunting and intimate. Anna is gorgeously rendered, but it’s the writing that makes this the novel it is.

Read this book.

OPEN WIDE – Jessica Gross

Rarely do I DNF a book. Simply not finishing a read is something I cannot wrap my head around, at least for me. If it works for you, great. But I do not DNF.  Or rather, it is extremely rare. I dnf’d Jessica Gross’s Open Wide when I reached page twenty.  I enjoy insane first person narration.  Make her a sexual deviant?  Okay. Bring on the madness, tension, and “I could wear your skin” lust.  This?  Yeah, it’s a hard pass for me.

I imagine Gross was swinging for the fences  for shock value and really leaning into reactions like mine when she wrote the paragraph about the narrator’s sexual “ritual” involving her dog.  It was enough for me to immediately close the book and nope outta there. I will never read another book by Gross.

PORCUPINES – Fran Fabriczki

“And after all, every story is a manipulation in one way or another.”

Fran Fabriczki’s debut novel, Porcupines ( Summit Books 2026), shows a lot of promise but ultimately falls just short of the mark because it under-delivers in each timeline, bringing us to a rather unsatisfying conclusion. I love the idea – but I was rather disappointed.

Sonia, a Hungarian immigrant, and her daughter, Mila, do have that grittier Lorelai and Rory comparison (as mentioned in the blurb), but their relationship isn’t really that central. It’s intended to be as Mila has done some covert investigation and “Parent trap” activity to find her father, but the novel meanders so much that Mila’s voice gets lost and that framing gets forgotten. We have Sonia in all timelines.  Sonia with her parents in Hungary. Sonia as a pre-teen living in DC with her diplomat father, mother, and sister. Sonia visiting her married sister, Rina and striving to connect with the girl she once considered her best friend. Sonia getting pregnant. Sonia raising a daughter and chaperoning a school trip. Mila’s voice is limited – a tool used to just push the story in a certain direction – and the search for her father reads like an afterthought.

Despite my issues with the story itself, the title is perfect. When Sonia visits Rina, she learns her sister has become very religious. Rina and her husband determine that Sonia needs some education on how to be Jewish. During a conversation with Rabbi Raskin, he tells Rina about the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and the parable of the porcupine. (In winter, they get cold and huddle together and then their quills prick each other so they spring apart – huddle together, spring apart, huddle together, spring apart.) This parable works well for Sonia’s family who have been huddling and springing for generations.

While the novel didn’t quite work for me, it did make me excited for Fabriczki’s follow-up; she’s only going to get better.

SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER – Vincent Yu

Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu ( Flatiron 2026) was a bit of a disappointment.  The novel is a series of interconnected short stories about residents of a small Asian-American community in Massachusetts following a false ballistic missile alert.  There is one section that takes place months after the alert and piggy-backs on an earlier section. Had these two stories served as the beginning and the end of the novel, it might have worked better because that particular family unit is central.  As organized, the story that takes place months after the alert seems out of place.

I’ve already dropped the book back at the library and can’t remember the different characters, but my favorite section dealt with the woman whose husband had a heart attack after receiving the alert.  Her sister comes to live with her.  A woman shows up and says that her husband had fathered a child with her and had been paying her child support for years and she’d like the support to continue. The use of her sister’s new hobby of birdwatching and the ending was just perfect.

Overall, I thought there were some interesting aspects here.  I really enjoy interconnected short stories that form a larger work, so I appreciated that; however, I didn’t really click with a lot of the stories.  I liked the opening story a bit and I also like what was being done with the mom/daughter relationship in the second (or third?). I do like the idea of a deep dive into multiple residents’ lives following the false alert (including the employee responsible for the false alert.) I just don’t know, some of them just seemed filler and bits cobbled from others.  (Which could have been intentional to showcase similarities within the Asian-American families – I don’t know; it was just meh for me.  BUT the stories that I liked were really good.

THE BOOK OF GOOSE – Yiyun Li

“If my geese ever dream, they alone know that the world will never be allowed even a glimpse of those dreams, and they alone know the world has no right to judge them. I live like my geese.”

Despite this being my “library” year, I am getting to some of the books on my physical TBR when there is a lull in holds.  Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2022) was one where the cover and blurbs first caught my attention. And while I think the novel is beautifully crafted and the writing is just exquisite, I am going to complain about the cover choice. It’s another situation where I wonder if the cover designer even read the book or just saw “goose” and said, “these Canada geese would be perfect.” Spoiler – they’re not. Again, I love the art – just not for this book.

Canada geese are not domesticated. They are also not native to France. Even though Agnes is living in America when she’s telling this story of her childhood and she is raising geese in America, she’s raising Toulouse and Chinese geese. Canada geese make no sense for the cover.  A pair of Toulouse geese would have been absolutely perfect. Or, if you want to say that Agnes is akin to a wild goose, pick a Greylag! But again, the perfect breed of goose for this book, for the story of a woman who grew up on a farm in France after the war with geese and goats and bunnies who moved to America and raises geese and is called “mother goose” by her in-laws… TOULOUSE WAS RIGHT THERE!

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, this story of Fabienne and Agnes, two girls growing up in rural France after WWII, best friends as different as night and day, is heartbreakingly beautiful. Fabienne, wild and unruly, leads the pair, with Agnes willingly joining in on the games she creates. When she decides to write a book, Agnes agrees. Fabienne tells the stories and Agnes writes them down. A widowed postman helps them form the book and finds a publisher. Fabienne decides that only Agnes’s name should be on it. The book is a success, and Agnes is heralded as a child prodigy for her unflinching look at postwar rural France. The “game” isn’t fun anymore, and Agnes wants out.

It’s a novel of girlhood, love, postwar France, loss, rural upbringings, poverty, escape, secrets, hunger and truth.  And geese, but I’ve already talked about that.

Read this book.

CANON – Paige Lewis

“They only bite what they don’t understand, which means, in this dream, Yara is biting everything.”

Paige Lewis’s Canon (Viking 2026) is one whackadoodle of a book. This  “nonbinary epic” will have you rolling.  The bard of this tale and the distinctive voice of the storyteller throughout the novel is fantastic.  The chapter headings are some of the best writing and all the allusions…The Waiting for Godot reference… *chef’s kiss* I want to write scholarly journal articles about this novel.  (I would love to see a lit comparison between Canon and Son of Nobody). I want this novel on my screen immediately.  That said, the dark humor as it relates to religion is not going to be for everyone. If you found Dogma or Christopher Moore’s Lamb (or Terry Pratchett) to be offensive or in bad taste, probably don’t pick this one up.  If you found them hilarious and also are a bit nostalgic for the 1990s, you need to read Canon asap – for the mall visit with Walden Books and Camelot Music alone!

The novel is insane but never once meanders.   Despite being all over the place, the writing is very tightly honed. Whether that’s Lewis or her editors or a combination, I don’t know, but that in itself is a huge accomplishment.

So, what is it about? In short, God enlists Yara, a non-binary barely adult with OCD, to defeat Dominic.  (Every hero needs a villain.) Meanwhile, Adrena, a prophet, is a bit annoyed she wasn’t tapped for the job, and misrepresents her mission to Harpo, the leader of the “Good Guys,” in hopes that she can be the one to defeat Dominic and the “Bad Guys” and get the glory. There’s also a whale named “HOWBIG!” whose father was named “WHALE.”  HOWBIG! is possibly the reincarnated Jacques Cousteau, and he is Yara’s guide.

Just read it.  It is unlike anything I’ve ever read before.  Just read it and enjoy the ride.