Book of the Day

From the review

Billie picks up the phone on the best morning of her adult life, hours after saying yes to a good man in New York City, and hears the voice of the boy she never quite finished loving. That's the hinge Giffin builds the whole book on, and she doesn't waste it. Mick's call isn't a plot device so much as a door swinging open onto a version of Billie's life she thought she'd sealed shut for good, and once she's on a plane back to Wisconsin, the present-tense New York chapters and the accumulating pull of home start to feel like two different gravitational fields fighting over the same woman. Giffin has always been good at interiority, and here she leans into it harder than usual. Billie doesn't just remember Mick, she re-litigates him: what she gave up, what he asked of her, whether the timeline of her own ambition was ever really her choice or just the shape circumstance forced her into. The device works because Giffin resists making Dean, the fiancé, into a strawman. He's steady and kind and genuinely chosen, which means Billie's unraveling can't be waved off as a woman simply picking the more exciting man. It's messier than that, and the book is better for refusing the easy math.