Anne Bogel

But she has a daughter who also gets pregnant while still in high school and has a daughter who the whole family, including the estranged great-grandmother who's brought back into her life, who's a renowned literary scholar, all try to do their best by this baby girl who grows up and we leave her in the story at the age of maybe 17.

Right.

But lots of thorny mother-daughter relationships and lots of questions about...

How or is it even possible to right the wrongs of the past?

And what might that look like?

But this book does interrogate the painful, traumatic things that have happened in our past and how the impacts of that play out.

And it would be really easy for this book just to be very on the nose and feel heavy-handed and

Like a textbook, and it does not as well.

The way that Johnson explores race, class, ambivalent parenthood, resentment, redemption is...

So good, so good, but it's hard and heavy.

Readers should know that going in.

But something I was especially charmed by and that felt so, I mean, it was just the right amount is the literary scholar who is the first generation in this book takes pride in her house.

She loves her neighborhood even though it's not particularly fashionable because it has this literary history that means a lot to her.

And the character, now this isn't like a major plot thing in the book.

And I don't mind that a bit, but I love that it's in the book and the author keeps coming back to it.

But that house is haunted.

And it is haunted by this past owner, this literary figure.

But sometimes it takes the form of the home's owner leaves the room, she comes back, things are not where she left them.

And sometimes that's pretty tricky when she's working on a manuscript.

But sometimes she'll come back from working on a manuscript and there will be handwritten notes and red pen on