Author: Anna Quindlen
Year published: 2026
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 240
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2026 Google Reading map): USA (NY)
Summary: No one knows you like your book club.
High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her students, her fraught relationship with her mother, her struggles with IVF—Polly’s book club friends have heard about it all.
But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. It is clear to Polly that this match is a mistake, but still she cannot help but comb through her family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.
Review: I haven't read an Anna Quindlen book in so long, but I thought Black and Blue was stunning, though a tough read given the topic.
I have a longtime friend who discovered that his entire cultural and familial identity was "wrong" when he took an ancestry test, so I knew this book would resonate with me. However, I didn't realize that the ancestry issue was really a subtopic. There were instead multiple threads in the novel: family, friendship, death, aging, secrets, and what we owe people in our lives.
Polly was a good narrator/center character as she is connected to all the dissparate characters. I think I didn't love this book because I expected a story about ancestry and how it affected the characters. Instead this part of it was a small thread that culminated near the end and didn't feel like a big reveal to me. I thought the storylines about Polly's attempts to get pregnant and her teminally ill friend were more compelling but less developed.
I think my overall feeling is that the multiple storylines felt like they were competing and therefore none were fully developed. Quindlen writes well and creates good characters, this one just ended up being good, not great for me.
Challenges for which this counts:
- 20 Books of Summer
- Alphabet (Author)--Q
No comments
Post a Comment