Book Chatter

The Things We Never Say
By Elizabeth Strout
Random House, May 2026, 224pp.

The Short of It:

Not what I expected.

The Rest of It:

“Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation.”

I love Strout and have read and loved so many of her books, so I have to be honest that this one fell a little short for me. Artie is a genuinely nice guy, and I appreciated his vulnerability, but he never quite had that special something that makes Strout’s characters so deeply endearing and memorable.

He can be a little whiny, and his wife is truly awful. I could absolutely relate to his being blindsided by the secret she had been keeping from him, but the revelation was not quite enough to carry me through the story. I kept reading because it’s Strout, and there were still moments of emotional insight and quiet sadness that worked for me. Even so, I found myself setting the book aside more than once because the story felt a little heavy and, at times, depressing.

I do not shy away from difficult or melancholy books, but Artie was missing that heroic quality that makes you root for a character and feel deeply pulled into his journey. This was still a thoughtful, well-written novel, but it was just okay for me, especially compared with Strout’s other work.

Source: Borrowed
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When Mikan Road Was Ours
By D.K. Furutani
Atria, July 2026, 320pp.

The Short of It:

Sincere in the telling. Poignant.

The Rest of It:

What initially caught my interest about this novel was the Los Angeles setting. I am a sucker for a Los Angeles story, so I snapped it up. When Mikan Road Is Ours is a heartbreaking novel in so many ways.

Mr. Murano is an English teacher battling a cancer diagnosis. He moves through his days mired in routine and boredom until he inherits his great-uncle Benjiro’s unpublished memoir. As a mixed Japanese American, he has no real desire to read it or learn more about his family. But at the urging of another family member, he reluctantly opens it and discovers a world he has spent years pushing aside.

The memoir offers a page-by-page account of the American concentration camps and the way his family’s simple life on a farm was upended by forced relocation and the loss of everything they owned. They endured horrible living conditions, hunger, and a lack of warmth. Once Mr. Murano learns his family’s history in such an intimate way, he can no longer ignore the truths that have been hidden from him.

This book makes a quiet but powerful statement about family and identity. We can choose to ignore the atrocities of the past, but they are still part of what makes us who we are. The Muranos hold family above everything else. Throughout their hardships, their goal remains the same: to keep the family intact.

In the light of the memoir, Mr. Murano experiences his own self-awakening. Against the backdrop of his health diagnosis, he begins to understand what it truly means to belong.

Recommend.

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.

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