Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson, transl. by Elizabeth Portch

Posted on October 12, 2026 by pagesofjulia

“Where are they going?” asked Moomintroll.

“To places where I’m not,” Snufkin answered…

“Loaded with cinnamon, sharks’ teeth, and emeralds,” said Moomintroll.

I got this off a list of recommendations, somewhere! (isn’t that always the way) that I can’t find now; I think it was a list of cozy winter reads. It’s my first introduction to the Moomins, although apparently they’re a force in the world – and visually just a little familiar, so who knows.

The Moomin household (in the Moominhouse) includes a bit of biological family – Moominmamma, Moominpappa, and Moomintroll – and quite a few more found, or built, or adopted, like the Snork Maiden (Moomintroll’s romantic interest) and her brother Snork, Moomintroll’s best friend Snufkin, the Hemulen, and the Muskrat. Etc. This family is all love and caring, even when there is bickering. We meet them first as they prepare for winter and a long sleep: “All Moomintrolls go to sleep about November. This is a good idea, too, if you don’t like the cold and the long winter darkness.” (I read that later on in the Moomin trajectory, they do discover that winter can be fun too.) And then they awaken, and interact with each other and with their world in a spirit of joy and wonder. Moomintroll, Snufkin, and Sniff find a hat, a great glorious top hat, that changes things (and people!) into other things – this will cause many problems, and some fun, before it is time for the hat to move on.

This book is marked as being for ages 9-12, and that feels about right. I enjoyed ripping right through its chapters (stories? but linked). I think they work well for younger readers, or for older ones looking for simple, parable-like tales. I can imagine wanting to spend more time in the simpler world of the Moomins. And the illustrations are delicious! Glad I found this quirky series.

Rating: 7 pancakes.

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The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (audio)

Posted on October 5, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Best book of the year. Thanks, Liz

An epistolary novel, via audiobook with a multitude of narrators: Maggi-Meg Reed reads the correspondent herself, Sybil Stone Van Antwerp, a formidable woman turning 73 when we first meet her. The rest of the cast read the parts of others, those who correspond in turn with Sybil, and several of these read more than one role: Jane Oppenheimer, Carly Robins, Jeff Ebner, David Pittu, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Mark Bramhall, Petrea Burchard, Robert Petkoff, Kimberly Farr, Cerris Morgan-Moyer, Peter Ganim, Jade Wheeler… and “various,” who I assume are Steve West and Jen Siebert?, two names verbally credited on this production but who I can find nowhere in print (so I’m inventing those spellings, sorry, best effort). While usually a single narrator handles a novel well, changing voices for different characters, I do appreciate the choice here. For one thing, a letter rarely opens with “Dear Sybil, this is John” or whatnot, and as I learned the voices (and accents!), it helped.

So. An epistolary novel, told entirely in letters (and less frequently, emails or notes) to and from our eponymous main character. Sybil is a hell of a character. I would call her, especially early on, indomitable, indefatigable, domineering, pushy, opinionated, bossy – some of these being the things we call a strong woman when we don’t like her very much. This book has pulled off that rarity: a generally unlikeable protagonist whom we still care deeply about. I did find myself applauding Sybil from time to time, especially later in the book, but she’s not easy to like. She is a flawed but eventually deeply sympathetic character, who has lived more than seven decades and has collected her share of disappointments and regrets. Remarkably, she is still capable in her 70s of learning new ways to be, trying new things, and – rarest of all – admitting she was wrong. By the end I’m quite proud of her (although I’m still not sure she’d be easy to like). We follow her selected correspondence for most of a decade, until it ends. And in these years, as Sybil puts it, her life is very full. Among other things, she entertains two suitors; finds some of her biological family for the first time (after adoption as an infant); embarks upon international travel for effectively* the first time; experiences a life-altering medical change; and navigates several important apologies or discussions of old wrongs. These are deeply impressive.

[*with an important exception which she argues should not count.]

I don’t know that I will attempt much more plot summary. Evans offers a full cast of fascinating characters as correspondents, including Sybil’s family (one adoptive brother with whom she is close; one adult child with whom she is not) and loved ones (her best friend with whom she has exchanged letters since they were children), strangers (authors and other public figures), and friends new and old. I felt the most tenderness for Sybil when she was addressing children, which she does with remarkable gentleness and wisdom for someone who can also be quite harsh, and when she was facing her own old mistakes. There is a customer service representative she emails with, who becomes quite something else (despite one of Sybil’s more face-palm faux pas in her opening missive). The richness and variety in these correspondents is delicious. I especially appreciate that while many of her regular letter-writers are of her generation, there is some diversity in age as well as in most every other sort of identity. Sybil tells us that we’d be surprised: much of the time she writes to someone, they write her back.

The argument is made that it’s easier to tell hard truths in writing than out loud, and we do get some heavy confessions and storytelling, from Sybil and from others. It is often a sad book, and Sybil is troubled and scarred, but she is as strong and awesome as she is flawed, in the end. I did really appreciate such a nuanced portrait of a protagonist who is both older and not automatically likeable; I think the novelist’s feat here is complex. I can’t stop thinking or talking about it, and I feel sure this will be the best book I read all year.

Rating: 9 cakes.

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Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin (audio)

Posted on September 21, 2026 by pagesofjulia

From the author of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, I found this earlier novel for younger readers. In a nutshell, I appreciated its thought-provoking nature, but some parts left me not entirely comfortable. I found the dialog a little stilted (‘however’ and ‘nonetheless’ in the voice of young people in informal settings). There was much good here; I’m stimulated by the way it has me thinking about life and death and aging and choices. My feelings are too complicated to make an unqualified recommendation, but I would love to discuss it with somebody!

Liz Hall is fifteen, nearly sixteen years old when she is hit by a taxi while riding her bike. She dies from her injuries, and wakes up on board a ship bound for Elsewhere. This afterlife resembles Earth in many ways, and people can be reunited with loved ones – and pets – there, although with a crucial twist: in Elsewhere, as time goes by, people get younger, not older. Liz has just fifteen or so years to create a new life in this new place. And she is pissed: she misses her old life, she wanted to turn sixteen and get a driver’s license, she wanted to go to college, maybe get married someday. Now that she’s getting younger again, she feels cheated. It takes some time for her to come to terms with the new set of options available to her. Meanwhile, we encounter other stories: Liz’s grandmother, who died when Liz was in utero (and is now approaching a youthful 40 years old); Liz’s favorite rock star, dead of a drug overdose; another teenaged girl; the head of the Division of Domestic Animals; a young man who still pines for his (still alive) wife.

The possibilities and limitations of the world of Elsewhere were interesting to me. I did appreciate the worldbuilding aspect, the creation of new rules, although not all my questions were answered. (For example, residents here choose an avocation, where they work for the joy of it. There is currency, although it seems to be just for pleasure spending. What of sustenance and the basic necessities? Are they free, or actually unnecessary? What of classes and classic divisions of society? There is a utopian aspect that’s not explicated to my satisfaction.) As Liz experiences her own losses – and gains – I was fascinated by some of the thinking she goes through. Perhaps foremost in my head: in this world, we seem to dread aging. Liz dreads getting younger. That alone got me thinking about the advantages of aging. Also, the option to watch the living on Earth through apparently magic binoculars got me thinking about the old question of what we’d choose to know if it were knowable. Do you want to know what people say about you when you’re not there? Do you want to know when you’ll die? Or how? Liz knows how much time she has left in Elsewhere, but as she learns, that doesn’t dictate what she’ll do with her time.

The most difficult issue of the book I will spell out for you here in white text, as is my practice for spoilers. Highlight to read, or skip it. Because of aging backwards, we can wind up with a couple that appears to be decades apart in age although they were better matched on Earth, because one died much younger than the other. But what of this: a man dies, say, in his 20s. A girl dies, say, in her teens, but because it has been decades since the man died, their Elsewhere selves are about the same age. Is it okay for them to date? The man has lived 20-something plus ten-something years: he is now ~35 to her 15. Seriously? …The important detail is whether he is now emotionally and experientially 35, or 15. I’m not sure Zevin has answered this to my satisfaction: it seems to vary case by case. I was unsure how to feel, and a little creeped out by such a relationship.

Cassandra Morris narrates in a very youthful voice that might match Liz’s own (the bulk of the story is told in her close third-person). It was sometimes a little hard for me to listen to – and maybe that’s what it’s like to be inside a fifteen-year-old’s head. (Bless their hearts.) I think she gave a good performance. But on the whole, the experience of listening to and thinking about this story I would term, not enjoyable, but thought-provoking.

Rating: 6 sets of pajamas.

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Sweet Pea by Kit de Waal

Posted on September 14, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A protagonist rich in vulnerability, empathy, and resilience faces sorrows with boundless love in this unforgettable novel of good cooking and built family.

Kit de Waal’s Sweet Pea is a novel about pain, kindness, and forgiveness, experienced through the life of an everywoman West Indian immigrant to England. Its unforgettable protagonist, Paulette, translates loss and insult into caring time and time again.

“Paulette was lucky. She slept in the same bed as her grandmother until she was six years old.” She has no mother, but “barely feels the loss because she… can’t imagine being loved any better than Granny loved her.” When Paulette is 11, she and Granny immigrate to working-class urban England, where, at the novel’s opening, Paulette works as an auxiliary nurse. She is 29 years old and yearning for a family, but her boyfriend, Denton, drags his feet. It is only upon his death in a car crash that she learns he already had a wife and three children of his own.

Awash with grief and betrayal, as even the friends who comfort her simultaneously scorn her naïveté, Paulette struggles through, finally achieving her longed-for pregnancy by way of Denton’s best friend. Garfield is an attentive partner and father, but their relationship is not based on love and does not last. Paulette again soldiers on, this time with the prize and star of her life: her son, Bird. As he grows into a young man, she loves him powerfully, with enough to spill over for friends, lovers, patients, neighbors, and another young boy whose life intertwines with Bird’s, and with Paulette’s, for good.

In prose rich with feeling and detail, de Waal (My Name Is Leon) imbues these events with significance even when they seem mundane. Paulette’s excellent West Indian cooking, the mutual support she shares with a chain-smoking Irish neighbor, the simple comfort she finds in cleaning and the odd cocktail buoy her. She aches for family, connection, belonging, and for her native St. Kitts. “All the English summers in the entire world would never make up for just one day from the childhood she took for granted. Light so white you had to hide under a tree, skies so blue, trees so green, the whole world bright like pirate’s treasure, amber, rubies, sapphires.”

Endlessly tending to others, at work and at home, Paulette builds an unusual family for herself despite all odds. Those she cares for hurt her, but this is perhaps the human condition, and she is rewarded by caring anyway: fumbling, wise, and willing to try again. Sweet Pea is a refreshing novel of compassion and redemption.

This review originally ran in the August 24, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 yellow quilts.

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Black Moon by Stephen Wright

Posted on August 31, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This fiercely imaginative, blood-soaked, starry-eyed, and exuberant epic based on the life of Irish pirate Anne Bonny will capture the dreams and nightmares of any daring reader.

Stephen Wright’s Black Moon is a wild romp of an adventure, lush with blood and debauchery, starring a spectacularly colorful character based on the historical figure of Anne Bonny. Readers will need a strong constitution for the violence and rape that populate these pages, but the heroine and her associates offer plenty of humor, thoughtful philosophy, and transcendence to balance the scales.

Not much is known about Anne Bonny, an Irishwoman turned pirate in the early 1700s. With this inspiration, Wright (Meditations in Green; M31: A Family Romance) invents Amethyst “Meeks” Connell. From early trauma to an orphanage, then a “sewing shop for recalcitrant maids” and a youthful marriage into the minor gentry, Meeks continually reaches to improve her circumstances. When her devoted husband, Georgie, lusts after the latest round of developing war between the major European powers, Meeks plays along. “In a short amount of time she [becomes] considerably adept at fencing,” followed by other forms of combat–it is a feature of Meeks’s character that she is good at most anything she puts her mind to. Georgie decides he must join the war himself and secures himself a commission, and Meeks accompanies him. Within minutes of reaching the battlefield, Meeks makes her first kill and is widowed.

Wright’s swashbuckling, stylish narrative unfolds perfectly naturally as Meeks lives as a soldier and a man (with a short haircut, she simply fails to correct the assumptions of her fellows); marries a woman and is widowed again; and, on the lam, sets sail for Ireland and home. When her ship is boarded by pirates, no reader will be surprised that she joins them. It is at this point that Meeks’s real adventures–and the shining love(s) of her life–begin.

Meeks loves the sky over the ocean at morning, which she judges “the ultimate source of all value.” She loves the lifestyle, the freedom, the riches, the violence, and the friends she makes. At sea, she lives as a woman again; vehement misogyny is common among sailors and pirates, but there are those who honor her skills. The pirate life is for “those who can work like miners, fight like demons, and revel like tosspots,” and Meeks keeps up with the best of them. “There remains, of course, the lingering issue of love.” Black Moon, however bloodthirsty, is also a romantic novel: spirited, atmospheric, raging, and joyful unto its unforgettable end.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the August 13, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 fingers.

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We Burned So Bright by TJ Klune (audio)

Posted on August 3, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A bit of a complicated story for this one. I started it for the first time maybe six weeks again, and had to put it down about halfway through. On Liz‘s good review, I did decide to try it again, and got back on my library’s wait list. My track record with TJ Klune has been to passionately love almost everything of his, and fail to make it through the rest. This one was indeed worth reading (listening to), but I struggled with one rough part.

The world is ending. A black hole is scheduled to devour the earth, along with everything else in the solar system. Human society has reacted more or less as we might expect: many people take to looting, rioting, and general bad behaviors; some continue living on as if everything is normal; some seek their final, profound experiences, bucket-list-style. There is friction at those intersections. Our protagonists are two older men, Don and Rodney, who have been a couple for more than 40 years. (I think they are in their 70s, but I did not search up that detail.) They are making a cross-country trek in an aged RV, headed for the west coast, where they have an important task to complete, a promise to keep, the nature of which remains murky for much of the story, although there are hints.

Along the way, they meet people from the different rough categories I’ve drawn above. Some might call these ‘bad’ or ‘good’ people, or say that Don and Rodney have better and worse experiences with them, but, you know. People. It is in one of these episodes that I initially had to put the book down. (If you’ve read it, you can probably guess which one. At least it feels obvious to me!) Liz was right: the book moves again through light, through better experiences and better faces of humanity. The final revelations and final scene… are more uplifting, and certainly thought-provoking. There was much that was good to contemplate, and some of it was also good in that other sense. Klune does expose his reader to some darkness – that was not unexpected. Some of it hit me a little wrong, or more likely, a little at the wrong time in my life, but we got through.

“Luck,” Don said. “Rotten, shitty luck.”
Jerri laughed. “It is. So much. But here we are, strangers who never would have met. Maybe that’s what the point of all of this was. To have these random moments of collision, to learn from each other, to hear stories.”
“To live,” Rodney said.
Jerri looked back out at the animals. “I suppose you’re right…”

I really love this author. I remain on the edge of my seat for whatever he does next. I appreciate his take on grief, aging, and the end of the world in whatever form, and I trust his wisdom on these questions. (He is not so aged, just almost precisely my age, ha! but does have some experience with loss.) It’s a gorgeously written story, full of detail and specificity and beauty and wonder, and I’m not done thinking about it. I’m actually still thinking quite a lot about Take Me With You, and finding some parallels there. It’s a beautiful book. As ever, beware the darkness.

Also as ever, Kirt Graves’ narration is spot-on. I don’t want any Klune from anybody else.

Rating: 8 night swims.

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Dear Future Occupants by Keith Stahl

Posted on July 31, 2026 by pagesofjulia

An unusual family navigates small-town Connecticut in 1979 with wacky adventures, conflict, and love in this funny, affecting debut novel.


Keith Stahl’s first novel, Dear Future Occupants, relates the poignant, madcap adventures of a dysfunctional but essentially loving family. In March of 1979, Bud Sommer moves his family back to Greenhill, Conn., having inherited his childhood home, a massive, crumbling 17th-century estate. Bud, a sometimes painter and aspiring restaurateur, has also used his wife Rebecca’s inheritance to purchase a nearby diner. Joining Bud and Rebecca are their middle-school-aged sons, Victor and Wade; their eldest son, Herman, who has spent recent years hitchhiking around the nation; and the family dog, named The Dog. Victor, who has been bullied at school, begins running around with the “lav rat” kids, who smoke in the restrooms. Meanwhile, his little brother, Wade, a piano prodigy, experiences one accidental injury too many and chooses to wrap himself in bubble wrap around the clock. Long-haired Herman likes to wear women’s clothing, to the great distress of his parents. A literal skeleton is discovered in the basement of their dilapidated home, and a local adjunct professor moves in to study it. One absurdity after another plagues this motley household, until it seems that something will have to give.

The Sommers experiment with church, rehab, open mic nights, therapy, and a new business scheme that involves hiding buds of high-grade marijuana in boiled liver, thyme, and wheat-germ sandwiches. Stahl’s narrative shifts perspectives: Bud and Victor tell their first-person stories in alternating chapters, interspersed with Herman’s ventures in creative writing, which include short stories, poetry, and satirical news articles. Wade and Rebecca, as well as other colorful characters like Bud’s beautiful young waitress, Cassandra, and Victor’s school ally, Strom Luger, remain observed rather than observers. Stahl’s background in poetry colors his detail-rich descriptions of such zany episodes as family Wiffle ball tournaments, their visit from Child Protective Services, and Bud’s imaginative game of gruesome food-service deaths. The personalities of Stahl’s outlandish characters engender often surprising humor.

Against the backdrop of conservative small-town Connecticut in 1979, the Sommers grapple with concepts of family, sexual identity, counterculture, and drug and alcohol use. With pathos, humor, compassion, and great energy, this novel offers a moving examination of the meaning and acceptability of Herman’s cross-dressing and the value of family–in general and in this sweet, troubled individual case. The title of Dear Future Occupants refers to the marks left on the Sommer home; its story is arguably about the tension between conformity and authenticity in the Sommers’ impact on a larger world. The result is preposterous, exuberant, and tender.

This review originally ran in the July 6, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 Easter eggs.

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Misery’s Wife by Joan Tierney

Posted on July 17, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Misery’s Wife is a lovely, off-kilter fable about family, sisterhood, love, transformation, and humans’ relationship with the rest of the world. It uses repetition and sets of threes in ways that feel familiar to a fairy tale tradition. I think I was expecting something referencing Persephone or Eurydice, but it turns out that Tierney here recasts a Portuguese folktale, with foods, names and language from that culture. I was unfamiliar but still found it all accessible and enjoyable.

We first meet the parents of three sisters. Agueda and Jaco have three girls, and during each pregnancy, Jaco goes on a mini-quest to ease his beloved wife’s discomforts, and each time, this results in the newborn daughter’s allegiance: Adelina is a child of the night and the sea; Borboleta is a child of the day and the sky; and Dores is a child of the wind and rain, “and Misery itself will bend to kiss her feet.” They grow respectively into a young woman who adores all things strange; one who admires and exudes beauty; and one who is mild-tempered and shy, given to daydreams. In a single day, Adelina elopes with the King of the Ocean. Borboleta runs away with the King of the Sky. And Dores declines the offer of the King of Misery, but he abducts her anyway.

Years pass. Agueda and Jaco mourn their three lost daughters. But lo (the book surprises us), there is a fourth, younger sister, a child of luck and fortune. “There was also the mistaken belief, in those early years, that Elixane was in fact a son rather than daughter… these things happen, and are remedied easily enough once the child themself can put voice to the truth.” As Elixane grows into a young woman, she receives three mysterious messages, one from sea, one from sky, and then a final message from the queen of Misery. “She asks that you find her and save her from her king.” As she prepares for this quest, Elixane meets Luck, who has (naturally) followed her all her life; he is accompanied by his sister, Jinx. Off and on, the pair will accompany her as she meets with each sister in turn, and endeavors to rescue Dores from Misery, as well as lifting a curse and generally improving circumstances in the kingdoms of sea and sky, and that of land and humans as well. Misery’s Wife is set in a future world badly damaged by anthropogenic climate change, which, like Elixane’s identity as a trans woman, is treated only glancingly.

I liked this story, although the stretches set in the kingdom of Misery were sometimes hard to read. I liked the representations of the love and devotion of family, of sisters and of friends, as well as the loving marriages (“When you marry someone, you marry their battles, too”), contrasted to Misery’s abuse (“Dores’s skin was pockmarked with bruises… The cat looked at the bruises and then looked at her eyes and said, ‘This is how it starts'”). I found the folk formula – repetitions in threes, quests and codes and riddles – soothing in its familiarity, which did not prevent plot twists. And I loved the decidedly happy ending. By that conclusion, I’d say that despite some comforting framing, Tierney has given us a surprising, thought-provoking fable that I will not soon forget.

Rating: 7 roosters.

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Take Me With You by Catherine Ryan Hyde (audio)

Posted on July 13, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I’m pretty blown away by this one, which seems to have hit me just exactly right.

We begin in scene, and put together details as we find them. A man named August is living, with his little dog Woody, in his RV where it is parked at a car repair shop; he wanted very badly to make it to Yellowstone this summer, but the cost of these repairs may make that impossible. He waits and worries. The mechanic, Wes, wonders if they might make a deal. His two young sons play with August’s dog. The two men talk. Wes is about to go into jail for a 90-day sentence and has no one to watch his boys. He suggests that Yellowstone may still be possible: he’ll do the repair gratis if August will take his sons away for the summer. This is a crazy idea on its face, of course. August is a stranger to Wes. But off we go.

August is a high school science teacher, and a recovering alcoholic, grieving the loss of his nineteen-year-old son almost two years previous. It doesn’t take much to put together that August will be moved by two slightly damaged, very sweet young boys (it’s not like August’s son was ever twelve or seven years old, August’s gruff AA sponsor points out with dry sarcasm), or that the boys, twelve-year-old Seth and seven-year-old Henry, are in need of a patient, stable father figure. Wes, it turns out, is an alcoholic.

August wondered if his job would be different if kids looked up at him with eager faces. And if even these two kids would have been the slightest bit eager for a science lesson if they had been in school. Maybe the school was the problem, August thought. Maybe everybody wants a science lesson if they’re sitting in the middle of one of the greatest geothermal wonders of the world. Maybe we’ve removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care. Maybe it’s not the kids’ fault. Maybe we made the first mistake. “I’ll start with geysers,” he said.

The odd threesome (foursome, with Woody, who has much to offer) have a pretty great summer together, although punctuated by the challenges of August’s grieving and the boys’ pain. When Wes has gone to jail before, they entered a county facility, and Henry hasn’t spoken since. He speaks, very little, but does eventually speak, to August. The bond is delicate but undeniable. But he’ll have to take them home again.

Take Me With You is gorgeous, wise, funny, heartbreaking, and a lovely evocation of natural beauty in several of our national parks, and of the pain and joy of making connections across grief and trauma. We meet a few indelible characters along the way (and the AA community looks awfully good in this context, really), but mostly it revolves around August, Seth, and Henry, with Wes coming in for the occasional hard edge. There are no villains and no real heroes, although August’s impact on these two young lives is significant.

Everybody is a good person and a bad person at the same time. The only real variation is in the balance.

Jeff Cummings’ narration feels pretty spot-on to me, capturing voices like that gruff AA sponsor, troubled Wes, and the timid cartoon mouse of young Henry’s rare words, as well as August’s careful, intentional slowing down to take questions seriously even when it hurts. The novel is contemplative, lovely in its descriptions, and cautious about coming to conclusions. Some of the relationships it describes are impossibly tender. I would love to continue to know these characters, and will be thinking about this book for a long time. It’s been a special journey; I think it’s going to be one of my favorite books this year.

Rating: 9 pictures.

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The Devoted by Catherine Cho

Posted on June 22, 2026 by pagesofjulia

The fast-accelerating plot of Catherine Cho’s first novel follows a young girl shielded from her father’s criminal underworld as she grows into a woman who must fight to chart her own way.

Literary agent Catherine Cho (Inferno) considers family, legacy, and fate in The Devoted, a deft debut novel of subtle questioning with a fast-accelerating plot.

Eunha is raised by her Korean grandmother in a village in Hong Kong, alongside her older brother, Solomon, and a single occasional visitor, a boy named Kai. It is a life of isolation, purportedly for safety’s sake; the children’s father is a Dragon Head, a powerful leader in organized crime. Eunha is aware from a young age of the powerful forces at play around her, causing her father’s absence and her mother’s institutionalization, bending her brother’s fate, and leading her beloved grandmother to yearn for another life for Eunha. In adulthood, Eunha believes she’s found that different path, but marriage to “a man who had never loved me” and a life of proper lunches at the Palm Club with other wives leaves Eunha no less lonely. Then her three-year-old son is abducted, and that shell of a life, too, is upended.

The child is returned to his mother, apparently none the worse, but Eunha learns yet again that her life is not her own. She begins to push in earnest against the powerful men who have always surrounded her: her father and her brother. In the upheaval, she reunites with Kai, now a Dragon Head as well, both the sensitive, magnetic boy she knew in youth and a frighteningly compelling leader. She considers again her brother and their childhood friend: “The way they turned and bent, synchronized. They looked like separate halves, reflected men.” Eunha questions whether she might still find the unencumbered life her grandmother had wanted for her. Can she keep her son safe? Can she choose for herself?

Much of The Devoted unfolds at a contemplative pace, evoking the powerlessness Eunha feels in her own existence. But as she starts to exert her own will, secrets and betrayals reveal themselves one on top of another, and the novel gathers speed into an electric tale of intrigue, many layered and consistently surprising. Cho’s first novel is at once a family saga, a narrative of identity and belonging, a love story, and a tale of suspense. The deceptively quiet package probes class and respectability and whether one can ever escape their upbringing. Eunha’s struggles are softly spoken but pack a wallop.

This review originally ran in the May 26, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 light-up trainers.

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