Why You'll Love This
Two people who were failed by the same family find each other in the wreckage — and somehow start building something worth keeping.
- Great if you want: found-family stories rooted in real, unglamorous damage
- The experience: warm but unsentimental — tender pacing with genuine emotional weight
- The writing: Larkin writes quiet devastation with precision — grief lands without announcement
- Skip if: you prefer plot-driven fiction over character and emotional interiority
About This Book
Freya Arnalds is thirty, broke, and running out of options when she returns to the suburban New York house she inherited and never wanted — only to find a teenager already living there in secret. Her niece Aubrey has nowhere else to go, and neither, it turns out, does Freya. What unfolds between them is a story about the wreckage families leave behind and the unlikely ways people piece themselves back together. Allison Larkin writes about the particular ache of returning somewhere you escaped, the complicated loyalty we feel toward people who hurt us, and what it costs to finally stop running.
Larkin has a gift for grounding big emotional weight in the physical and the specific — a crumbling house, a small town's long memory, the daily work of repair. Her prose is clean and direct without ever feeling spare; it trusts readers to feel what isn't said. The novel moves between Freya and Aubrey with a structure that gradually reveals how their histories interlock, rewarding patient readers with moments of recognition that land harder for having been earned. It's the kind of book that stays with you in the quiet after you finish it.