Why You'll Love This
Two women who had every reason to stay strangers end up cracking each other — and the reader — wide open.
- Great if you want: an unlikely female friendship rooted in grief, race, and real life
- The experience: warm but honest — funny in bursts, quietly emotional underneath
- The writing: Frank and Youmans write dialogue that feels overheard, not scripted
- Skip if: you want a tightly plotted mystery — the heart is the relationship
About This Book
When a tragedy upends a quiet neighborhood street, two women who have carefully kept their distance — one Black, one Jewish, both carrying more than they let on — are forced into each other's lives in ways neither anticipated. Marjette Lewis is a kindergarten teacher running on wit, community, and sheer determination, trying to hold her professional and personal life together without letting anyone see the cracks. Her neighbor Noa Abrams represents everything Marjette has decided to admire from afar. Then circumstance makes distance impossible, and what unfolds is a story about grief, friendship, single motherhood, and the particular courage it takes to let someone new matter to you.
Alli Frank and Asha Youmans write with a rhythm that feels lived-in and immediate — dialogue that crackles, observations about race and religion that land with humor and weight in equal measure. The dual-author voice gives the book an unusual texture, a sense that these two women and their characters are in genuine conversation with each other. The comedy never softens the emotional stakes; instead it sharpens them, making the tender moments hit harder when they arrive.
