LUNA, PHOENIX, QUEEN, the progression will make sense in hindsight

LUNA, PHOENIX, QUEEN
JULIE ORRINGER
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 13 December 2026

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A spellbinding tour de force from the bestselling author of The Invisible Bridge—a novel about varieties of infidelity, the provenance of a literary masterpiece, and the power of storytelling to shape identity and destiny.

Dava and Barr Pennington, professors at a Midwestern university, both harbor potent secrets. Fiction writing is his specialty, English literature is hers. But Dava is unhappy in their marriage, and secretly in love with a colleague, Svetlana White, who teaches in the Russian Studies department; spurred by their complicated liaison, she spends her nights working on a novel about two women who run a domestic violence shelter in coastal Maine. Though she loves the work and the refuge it provides, the writing becomes increasingly difficult as her memory begins to fail; tests reveal that she’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. After a precipitous decline, she moves to a memory-care facility in a neighboring town. Soon afterward, her husband, alone in the house at night, discovers her hidden manuscript, which he reads with envy, and then with anger, as he extrapolates his wife’s affair from the relationship described in the novel’s pages. Over the next two years he rewrites the novel and publishes it as his own, to wide acclaim. But persistent feelings of guilt lead him to confess his theft to an unlikely party, who leads others to the truth.

Luna, Phoenix, Queen tells its tale of artistic and marital betrayal in a chorus of voices. We hear from Barr as he becomes obsessed with Luna, a horrifically injured dog at a local shelter; from Dava as she meets Svetlana for the first time, on a transatlantic flight to Dublin; from Milo, Dava’s son, as he hides in the woods with Naomi, Svetlana’s daughter; from Svetlana, experiencing the loss of a relationship that ended before it could come to fruition; from Evie, Barr’s research assistant, who witnessed Dava’s last days at home with her husband; from James, the Penningtons’ younger son, who makes a startling discovery after his father’s death; and from Milo and Svetlana again, as they grieve the injustice of Barr’s theft and confront the devastation of Dava’s disease.

In a narrative that spans four decades and four thousand miles, Luna, Phoenix, Queen illuminates the power of storytelling and explores the terror of losing the ability to make sense of our world. It is a cry of rage against our vulnerability and helplessness; an acknowledgment of the mysteries beneath the familiar surface of our world; and ultimately, if unexpectedly, a radical testament to love in its many forms.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm a sucker for a revenge story. I know, I know, cheating on your wedding vows is okay when you're unhappy and also discovering your same-sex attractions in escaping your tedious, dull, humdrum, bad-heterosex marriage.

Not to me. Talk about it. Make a deal that gets you closer to a happier life. "I can't because {wafflewafflewaffle}." Yes you can; if there's no communication divorce them already and THEN go live that happier life. Be a grown up not a selfish adolescent in other words.

Happily for revenge-story lovers like me, most people are selfish adolescents. Like Dava. In love with Svetlana, not Barr her husband and father of her children, does she say "we should figure out how to get along in honesty while we finish raising the kids" or even the truthful "adios chickenfucker, my lawyer'll be in touch"? No! She lies and sneaks and Barr kinda-sorta knows it but can't be arsed to do anything about it until the horror of dementia eats Dava.

What he does is steal Dava's life of love that she led with Svetlana in the shadows and corners of theit bad-heterosex lives. Dava, you see, wrote her first-ever novel about her true love. Barr's got to clean out Dava's stuff as she disappears from the life she once led, of course; Svetlana has no legal standing to act in protection of Dava's life. (An excellent reason to be upfront with spouses being cheated on: they'll tell your lover the real deal about health and prospects for the future if only crow viciously, victoriously.)

Barr uses his creative writing teaching career's lessons to turn a good story into an excellent novel that catches a strand in the culture and rises on the blending of Dava's happiness away from him and his skill at shaping that story. And Dava can't do anything about it; she doesn't remember it. Svetlana? No legal or moral standing. A good reason to hide her sneakin' lyin' ways from her and Dava's mutual employer (I have to think it's all a fictionalized Iowa Writers' Workshop; it's in Iowa anyway). So Barr has free rein. His employer (the actual workshop) sees Dava's book's success in the wake of a terrible personal tragedy of spousal loss. He's not going to tell the real truth: he stole his cheatin' wife's tainted happiness and made it into better art than she could've, then let the market reward him.

Sleazy enough for a soap opera. But this, my olds, is not the last word on the subject.

Luna the (sadly but accidentally maimed) shelter dog gets Barr's urgent confession. She is then on a walk with her new doggy-daddy. In his declining years by now, Luna becomes the focus of Barr's need for an uncritical audience. His ever-more necessary assistant, Evie, ends up adopting Luna and renaming her Phoenix (why people think it's okay to rename animals grown into full personhood is a mystery to me) while catalyzing surprises.

Milo and Jamie, sons of Dava and Barr, reach out to Svetlana after their father's death brings the whole picture into focus. They want to know the woman Dava, obviously so different from their mother. It is Author Orringer's gift, by structuring the story as she did...alternating narrators by chapter...to keep homing in on the process of family secrets becoming known at a surprisingly effective pace. I'm aware of how judgmental I sound about Dava. I judge Barr harshly as well. I understand and empathize with them both now I've read the novel, and even willingly grant grace to Svetlana for her role in this needlessly complicated love triangle of sorts. Svetlana's utterly uninteresting daughter Naomi, and Author Orringer's use throughout these eight chapters filling under three hundred pages of the evil satanic second person for all narration combined cost the story a whopping quarter star.

Not ordinary for me. I'd've tossed it onto the Pearl-Rule pile early on most days! But I was forewarned that I'd need to read a lot of satanic second person text, so I persevered. The delicate dissection of the characters' reasons and decisions to do the things they did are so believably, humanly, laid out and so gently treated as the very difficult choices they were that I was never going to whap the story with the paddle I'd propped in the corner of my mind. I relate. Not condone but accept. I get it; I wish all y'all'd done different better things.

You couldn't. It's the human tragedy told again, told with accepting love that I hope to high heaven I receive when I go offstage the last time.

And Luna, the Phoenix...she truly got this story over the hill of my intolerance. She was my star, my belovèd dote of a character. You'll see.

Or you'll miss out on a truly delightful read.