Life and Other Love Songs by Anissa Gray

Posted on November 6, 2026 by pagesofjulia

From the author of The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls comes another novel that is likewise heart-wrenching and true to life, about family and pain and how we relate to one another. We track several characters at several points in time, mostly in Detroit. The prologue introduces Trinity, a young woman at her father’s funeral in the spring of 1989. They are burying an empty casket. It’s been some years since her father, Oz, just vanished after lunch on his thirty-seventh birthday.

Then we meet Deborah, who in the early 1960s sings with a trio, hoping to make it big and leave her day job washing dishes at the hospital. She’s just finished singing at her group’s regular rent party when she meets young Oz, who is recently moved north from Alabama, escaping a vague trauma and the loss of his father and their home in a fire. Chapters alternate between these three main players: we watch Deborah and Oz court, marry, and have baby Trinity; we watch Deborah approach the very brink of stardom; we eventually see what happened on the day Oz disappeared. Slowly, we piece together the holes in the story: where Oz went. What happened back in Alabama. What happened to Deborah’s musical career. We see the later accomplishments of Deborah and Trinity, and Oz.

The story follows a Black family in 1960s-80s Detroit (and sometimes Alabama), into the 1990s. You would be right to expect difficulties related to race and racism, class, and the Great Migration. There is sexual assault and domestic violence, and there are gay men struggling to exist, let alone be accepted for who they are. These are the challenges – some important points of conflict, in plot terms. There are also the human challenges of relationships, love, and family, which are universal. These are lovely, moving individuals, even when they are haunted, even when they make choices we may not love. Gray writes true people, and I felt for every one of these people, even when I was frustrated with them. It’s beautiful work, a classic unique-in-the-universal portrayal of family and humanity. I’d love to read more in this vein, and hope this author will have more for us.

Rating: 7 Reese’s Cups.

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Winter Song by Rebeca Lee Morales

Posted on October 23, 2026 by pagesofjulia

During a small-town Midwestern winter, a young felon who proclaims his innocence and a police chief nearing retirement face off in this debut novel of hard questions and strange loveliness.

Rebeca Lee Morales’s first novel, Winter Song, is quietly astonishing.

In the deep, cold winter of 1986, in a small Minnesota town, police chief Gordon Trent sits alone in the cold house he shared with his late wife, pondering his approaching retirement, which he intends to delay as long as possible. He shares cold toast with the dog, attends the scene of a death by apparent suicide, and visits with an old friend, a retired fellow officer. Then the narrative shifts to focus on Byron Lugo as he is released from prison. Now 26, Byron has served his time for vehicular homicide: a hit-and-run for which Byron is very sorry, but he has always maintained his innocence. Having regained his freedom, he is determined to get his life back: job, car, house, fiancée–although the latter has married someone else. Trent’s belief in justice is, more than ever, what gets him through his work and his life; Byron’s insistence that justice has not been served is unwavering. The two men persist in calm, polite, staunch disagreement, until one of them is proven correct, and lives are once again upheaved.

The town that serves as backdrop, Montevideo–known as Monte–is as clearly portrayed as any of its residents, who make up a cast of colorful, flawed, but sympathetic men and women laboring at a no-frills, working-class existence. These include the woman who runs the thrift store, Byron’s soft-spoken father, a diner waitress, and Byron’s small but unwavering group of friends. The novel’s action rises to bar scenes with dancing and pool, a demolition derby, and an act of startling violence. But much of its greatest drama takes place in subtler moments: conversation, reflection, the pulling back of a covering drape. With grace, humor, and wise observations of human behaviors, Winter Song examines what everyday people can and cannot, or will not, live with; forgiveness, justice, friendship, and community; and the question of whether a fresh start is truly possible.

Morales has captured an American town and the human condition, in all their wounds and splendors, and in simple dignity. With deceptively deep focus and nuance, she applies an attention to detail that exalts even snow in “heaping begrimed ramparts” and the stark struggles of humble existence. For all its many tragedies, and a good dose of dramatic irony, this novel is searingly beautiful and surprisingly hopeful in the end.

This review originally ran in the September 21, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 cups of coffee.

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Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

Posted on October 19, 2026 by pagesofjulia

From the author of Yolk comes this utter delight about two young people struggling to find their ways and their people. I loved it!

We meet Penny just as she’s getting ready to leave home and head off to college, which can’t come soon enough. She figured out in ninth grade “that she wouldn’t be popular until she was a grown-up and that was fine because life was a long con,” and she’s always been awkward. She has a boyfriend she barely knows and doesn’t much care for; it’ll be a chore to break up with him, but he was only with her because he has a thing for Asian girls anyway. She’s used to the microaggressions, like her teacher’s need for her to be “exotic” despite being born in Seguin, Texas. She loves her mom Celeste, who is needy, emotional, and obsessed with beauty products, but she’s also furious with her. It’s a great relief to head off to UT Austin, where she hopes to pursue her writing.

Then we meet Sam, a few years older, who sleeps on a mattress in a storage room upstairs from the coffee shop where he works. Sam would like to be developing as a documentary filmmaker, but he’s broke, estranged from his mother, struggling to keep away from a toxic ex, who, oh joy!, has just told him she’s pregnant.

And wouldn’t you know it: Penny’s assigned college roommate turns out to be Jude, a privileged, bubbly young woman who was briefly, by marriage, related to Sam. Jude and her best friend Mallory latch onto Sam, dragging Penny along for a first meeting which is deeply awkward but also reveals a magnetism that is mutual, though neither realizes it.

Their second meeting is sort of perfect, and (as the back of this book has it) sort of the opposite of meet-cute: Sam has a panic attack on Sixth Street, thinks he’s dying of a heart attack, and Penny rescues him. She recognizes what he’s going through. They exchange numbers, and call each other ’emergency contact.’ From there, contact is near-constant, but only via text message. Within the little screen, their connection is sublime: all awkwardness falls away; “even on text, where there are no inflections or nuance or tone for non sequiturs. You’ve always spoken fluent me.” Penny and Sam would not be the first or the last people to find it easiest to confess their deepest, most vulnerable feelings in a format that’s not face to face. It’s the perfect relationship – if they can just keep it out of the real world. They can’t, of course.

I love that this novel about weird, wounded, awkward young people does wind up a very sweet romance, by a circuitous path. And neither has to change themselves, although they will open up a little. This process opens them up just a touch to the rest of the world, as well, and Penny and her mother even have a bit of a moment. It felt like an echo, because I had just watched 10 Things I Hate About You (for the first time!) with the main teenager in my life, and had a chance to observe that we don’t have to bend ourselves toward ‘normal,’ whatever that is – we just hope to find our own particular brand of weirdo, the ones whose eccentricities match or complement our own. (A song lyric: “I’m lookin’ for baggage that goes with mine.”) It feels wholesome, and preserves what is most odd and wonderful about Penny and Sam.

I’m already working on getting into more of Choi’s work.

Rating: 8 pieces of sheet cake.

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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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