THE PALM HOUSE – Gwendoline Riley

“As long as it’s not boring. That’s our motto now.”

Set in London in 2017, The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley is my least favorite Booker read to date.  I’ve never read Riley before, but I have seen some comparisons drawn between her and Rachel Cusk.  That tracks. I don’t like either.  It’s a writing style that I loathe. (I’ve been told to buckle up – it appears the longlist favors that style this year.)

The novel takes its name from the Palm House in Kew Gardens, an iconic structure of London. It’s a very large greenhouse with numerous tropical and subtropical plants, and it’s a bit of an industrial/engineering marvel. Laura (our narrator) and her friend, Edward Putnam are supposed to visit the Palm House to see the cycad, a prehistoric plant, with his father. His father dies, and they don’t go. I could about the title and the glass panes and Laura’s life, but I didn’t like the book enough.

The novel is framed with architectural structures, primarily structures tied to Laura, but it does open with Edward pointing out where he had lived in the 1980s. I don’t really like any of the sections with Edward. But I tend to get really annoyed really quickly by the “literary intellectual crowd” in literature. I wanted to DNF the book with that opening.  Especially when Laura puts toast on a table by the tub when she bathes because she’s “not washing [her] hair,” I pondered why I was subjecting myself to something I don’t enjoy in the slightest.

Things improve considerably when Laura talks about herself. The holiday to Croatia with her mom and grandma where they bought workers’ shoes because they liked them, making a uniform their costume.  The palmist who didn’t exactly read Laura’s future. The obsession with and assault by the older comedian when she’s a teen. He records the encounter without her consent, positioning her for the camera.  “I imagine then, on his recording, I looked something like a frightened horse. The way their eyes go.” The relationship with the older actor. We get a lot of non-Edward content. Thankfully.

I’m 4 for 4 with Christmas celebrations in the Booker read.

THE GREAT WHEREVER – Shannon Sanders

“Because who wants to be known as some kind of ho-bag haunt.”

Shannon Sanders’s debut novel The Great Wherever (Henry Holt 2026) might be my favorite ghost story of the year – it certainly has a couple of my favorite ghosts.  The novel opens with Aubrey Lamb getting dumped. She was already floundering a bit, especially after her father died, and then to be dumped when she was anticipating a proposal?  Of course, she jumps at the chance to get out of DC for a bit, joining the other three owners of the family farm in Tennessee to discuss a possible sale of the land. Aubrey quickly realizes there is significant value in the farm, and money is something that Aubrey could use.

What unfolds is a family saga that takes us back to when the land was built by slaves and our first ghost, the matriarch of the Lamb family.  Without giving too much away, the novel involves years of family tension, inheritance, estate planning, adverse possession, rumors, and bad blood between siblings.  Oh, and four remarkable family ghosts.

Read this book.

SOME PEOPLE – Parini Shroff

“We’re all just people, trying. We’re all eggshells, walking around trying not to bump into shit that will break us.”

I really enjoyed Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queens, so I was eager to read the follow-up novel, Some People (Ballantine Books 2026). While it is a very different book from The Bandit Queens, the writing and the heart of Some People is the same. It is a heart hug of a book, and I loved it.

The novel alternates between Nathan and his mother-in-law, Malti Patel’s, POVs.  Nathan is currently separated from Malti’s daughter, Kavya, and Kavya is in grad school in India – much to both Nathan’s and Malti’s dismay.) When Malti is injured, the hospital calls Nathan because Kavya is Malti’s emergency contact and Nathan is still Kavya’s. He agrees to stay with Malti for a few days, which appeases the doctors into releasing her. Neither one of them is exactly excited about the situation, but they both love Kavya. Malti knows if Nathan doesn’t watch her, Kavya will leave the grad program and come home. Nathan knows this as well.  They both want the best for Kavya, and Kavya believes the best thing for her, at this time, is to be in India.  So, the Indian woman and the white man her daughter is in the process of divorcing are thrown together – for better or worse.

What happens is full of humor and heart and healing.  I loved their relationship, partly because the reader realizes sooner than they do that they are very similar. Their similarities are also mirrored in their fractured relationships with Kavya.

Some of my favorite “heart hug” authors are Fredrick Backman and Annie Hartnett. Add Parini Shroff to the list.

Read this book.

THE DAFFODIL DAYS – Helen Bain

Helen Bain’s debut novel, The Daffodil Days (Scribner 2026), would have been on my Booker Longlist predictions had I read it earlier.  (It would likely have replaced A Beautiful Loan.) And while it’s too late for me to change those predictions, I will stand ten toes down behind this novel.

Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology is a work that has stuck with me for years, and Bain’s debut seemed to echo with it.  Instead of free verse poems narrating the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, Bain gives us short stories of various residents who interacted with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes during the last year of her life.  It’s a small town, and the stories bleed into each other, recast from the point of view of a different villager.  My favorite is likely “The Jaeger Suit,” in which Jenny, a young shopgirl, serves Sylvia when she comes into Kestrels for a dress. I also thoroughly enjoyed the doctor’s story and the horseback riding instructor. And the beekeeper. The individual stories aren’t so much about Sylvia as about the people who orbited around her.  And the bells.  The church bells or the clangers feature heavily throughout the collection.

Daffodil Days is well done, and the voices are distinct while still cohesive to the village. The bells, colors, daffodils, Sylvia… there are so many threads binding this work, and I really enjoyed it.

Read this book.

The Pōhaku – Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes

“Death has been chasing this story for generations, trying to kill it.”

The Pōhaku by Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes (HarperCollins 2026) has all the elements of the type of story I love: family saga, a storytelling tradition, and a bit of magic realism. Add the fact it is about the Hawaiian people and boasts a stunning cover, and I cannot fathom how it didn’t end up on my radar when it was released earlier this year.  But as fate would have it, I went to Fable Books and Café last weekend, and there she was. The woman who rang me up skimmed the flap.  “Ohhh, it sounds like Moana for adults!” She wasn’t wrong, but there is no Disney ending here.

The novel is framed by a grandmother frantically telling her granddaughter the story of the women in their family and the pōhaku, the magical stone their family had been tasked with protecting and the stories the stone carried.  The granddaughter is on life support following a near drowning, and a hurricane is fast approaching. Time is running out.

The story starts in 1740 with the Earl of Sandwich and his mission to find the Lost Tribes of Israel, thought to be somewhere in Oceania. Bu this is not the story of conquerors; this is the story of women and their connection to the land via the magical stone that was lost somewhere in California in the 1800s. It is both the history of a people and the history of a family.

There is so much to appreciate and enjoy with this novel; however, it did fall short for me. IMHO, I needed more. More flesh to the bones, more heart to the stories. It is so short but covers so much ground, and I was unable to fully connect to our cast of strong, powerful, resilient Hawaiian women.

I liked the framework of the grandmother telling her granddaughter the story, but the storytelling voice wasn’t consistent – it either needed to be all or nothing. Additionally, the ending is not satisfying, but I think it served the story’s purpose well.

In short, there are some things that didn’t work for me in this novel because I wanted more.  But that’s the point. History has eroded the stories passed down from generation to generation, and only bits and pieces have survived. 

But we still need those stories.

Read this book.

NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED – Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Love a true crime podcast / tiktok live cross over? You’ll enjoy Yu-Mei Balasingamchow’s Names Have Been Changed (Tiny Reparations Books 2026). The novel is set at the tail end of the Covid and told over the course of a little over a month as a “confessional podcast.” As indicated by the title, names have indeed been changed as our narrator has been on the run for years.

She tells her “listeners” to call her Ophir, and the podcast opens with her explaining how she became a money mule by trusting her best friend. She manages to escape as the authorities crack down, and she’s been on the run for years. But serving as the mule and stealing 60k isn’t her only crime, and this isn’t a redemption or request for forgiveness.

It’s a well done debut, and I really enjoyed Ophir’s voice.  I’m not the biggest fan of unreliable narrators, but I really enjoyed how this operates via the confessional podcast.  It’s a really good choice for a quick, thrilling summer read.

WHISTLER – Ann Patchett

“Your mother and I both have a small shard of glass in our hearts where the other is concerned: her disappointment, my shame, her regret and my regret.”

“Because in the book, I don’t die. In the book, we’re sitting on this bench, talking about a book about the two of us, and then the story stops with us waiting for Jonathan and your mother to come back.”

Somehow, Whistler ( Harper 2026) is my first Ann Patchett. I’m not sure why I’ve avoided her, particularly Tom Lake, but I did.  So, my first Patchett is likely going to be in my top five reads of the year. It doesn’t change my Booker predictions (despite two Booker shortlisted books and one Booker winner being mentioned in the novel), but this was a heart hug of a beautiful novel.

Daphne Fuller and her husband (mostly her husband) notice an elderly man following them while they are at the Met. When the man is questioned by her husband, he is revealed to be Eddie Triplett, the man who was married to her mother for less than two years when Daphne was nine. Daphne had loved him, and she had always blamed herself for him leaving. At the age of 53, she reconnects with him and they explore what happened so many years ago, revisiting the past and the stories that held them afloat – including that of a horse named Whistler.

It’s a tender story told in a familiar way that thumps with heart and the distant sound of hooves. 

Read this book.

SHOULD THE WATERS TAKE US – Stephanie Soileau

I love a family saga, and when the publisher sent me Stephanie Soileau’s Should the Waters Take Us (Doubleday 2026 – thanks for the copy! I wish I’d gotten this out sooner – the book was released 7/14/2026!), I was thrilled. Family saga spanning centuries and set primarily in the Louisiana bayou? Yes, please.

Let’s first talk about this cover. Could it be anymore perfect?  The colors, the brushstrokes, the image, the font.  It’s simply gorgeous.

Now let’s get to the meat.  This book covers a lot of ground but continuously brings you back to the present day where a woman has a died, there’s an oil spill, a family has fractured, and a hurricane is coming.   The fluidity and continuity of the time jumps works extremely well as the story of the Acadians and their resilience in the fight for land and survival takes us over four hundred years. While I appreciated seeing the past, it was the present story that held my attention – particularly that of Boy, his daughter, and the Nigerian parish priest.

I loved these perfectly imperfect characters, and the way Soileau handles the dialogue, using dialect without translations, was rather masterful. You’re not missing out if you don’t speak French, I promise.

Stephanie Soileau is a bit Pat Conroy meets Flannery O’Connor but all Soileau; her love for the Louisiana coast and its people is on every page.

Read this book.

TREAT THEM AS BUFFALO – Blair Palmer Yoxall

“He’s the heaviest secret I ever carried. I don’t want to carry him no more.”

This is a difficult review, because I was so looking forward to Blair Palmer Yoxall’s debut Treat Them as Buffalo (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2026 – fun fact, I interned at Algonquin over 20 years ago. My duties included reading through the slush pile and sending rejections); however, this historical fiction / anti-Western set in 1885 in what is now Saskatchewan and told from the POV of Nikosis “Niko” Eriksen, a 12-year-old Métis boy, just missed the mark for me.

The novel echoes Django Unchained, another revisionist western, byincorporating modern slang (this didn’t work for me at all – I’m not sure if it wasn’t done well enough that it was clearly intentional, or I just didn’t like it) and using hyper-stylized violence to expose the systemic racism faced by the Métis people. That combined with the use of mythology (Odin is our villain) and the importance of our stories all give it this vibe that makes me wonder if it would not be better suited for the screen.

The novel opens with Niko and his cousin, Cousin, pretending to be buffalo hunters. (They’ve never even tasted buffalo meat.) Cousin is kidnapped. Cousin ends up being one of several young boys who have been taken and castrated for a bounty.  (This castration for a bounty seems a fictional component, but forced sterilization of Métis youth was a common practice that went on for decades under provincial eugenics laws and history should never forget.) The police seem questionable in their interest in the kidnappings. (Also questionable but for different reasons is Father Brisson.) Kate McCannon, a woman with a sawn-off shotgun and a reputation, heads up a group made primarily of women and children to recover the boys. The so-called “Pussy Posse” is a branch of a larger vigilante group in Deadwood.

It’s definitely a punch to the face kind of novel.

CHILDREN OF THE WILD – Kevin Powers

Based on the premise and the reviews, I thought I was sure to enjoy Kevin Powers’s Children of the Wild (Harper 2026). Color me wrong. I was so disappointed in this book.  And quite honestly mad at myself for finishing it.  But where did it go wrong? Historical fiction set in 1917, isolated rural valley in VA, a bit of a love triangle between the minister’s daughter, the son of the prominent Young family, and the wild boy found up on the mountain. And WWI.  I should have eaten this one up, but it simply failed to deliver. Based on reviews, this is not a popular opinion – but here we are.

Let’s start with the minister’s daughter, Sam. She’s never fully developed. Her character shimmers and shifts, never fully deciding what it wants to be. This doesn’t seem intentional, and she seems more like a plot device than a formed character. Despite this, she has her own sections.

Then there’s Roy, the heir apparent to the Young family farm. He also shimmers and shifts, his character changing not from the things that happen to him or the situations he finds himself in but when the plot needs him to change to advance itself. He’ll punch someone and then two lines later, they’re best friends. He’ll say hateful things to his father and then be a voice of reason. There’s no growth in his character.

And then Ennis, the more interesting of the three. Ennis had the most potential, but the feral wild child from the mountains whose family was likely killed in a flood and whose name is likely not even Ennis never gets the story he deserves.

There are so many missed opportunities with all three of these “children” as they fight for their country, the valley, and each other.  And there are also so many unnecessary and underdeveloped plot points.  It reads like a skeleton that hasn’t been fully fleshed out and clothed yet.

I was so annoyed.