BLOOM, what we all hope we'll have space to do but more often do not

BLOOM
ROBBIE COUCH
Gallery Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of If I See You Again Tomorrow comes a delightful and heartwarming novel about family, love, grief, and one precocious houseplant, that reminds us of the beauty of living a life in full Bloom.

Morris Warner is withering away. After the sudden death of his husband, Fred, he has shut himself off from the world. No more going to movies with friends, or swims in Lake Michigan, instead preferring the quiet loneliness of his history books and Jeopardy episodes with only the cat to hear his answers.

Morris’s stepdaughter, Sloan, feels like she has nowhere to grow. She’s about to get married to the man of her dreams, if only her mother will let her actually plan her own wedding and trust her to build her own life after her father’s death.

Jade is drying out. Literally. As a plant in Morris’s home, she and her plant housemates have been slowly wasting away, leaf by falling leaf, since Fred’s death and Morris’s lack of care. She needs to come up with a plan to make her new owner come back to life, no matter what it takes.

New York Times bestselling author Robbie Couch’s Bloom is a wondrous novel where family, love, kindness, and yes, Mother Nature, triumph.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Masses of w-verbing = one star irrevocably, irretrievably gone.

Y'all need to stop that. Jade wouldn't like it, stolidly practical being that she is. Neither do I.

It's the PoVs...Jade the succulent jade plant, abandoned by Fred's untimely passing and neglected by Morris; Morris the bereft widower of Fred, who's really withering up and giving up his life from grief (been there, bud); and Sloan who's Fred's youngest daughter, stuck in a cesspit of grief for her favorite parent and still going through with her ghastly, Babbitty mother's vision of what her wedding to her one true love Todd ought to be.

It all kicks off as Sloan has a bridezilla moment in the florist shop and runs right TF away from her bickering mother and aunt as each tries to force her own choices on Sloan. Even though she's never been close to Morris, her father's teaching colleague and now his widower she runs to her dad's house to talk to Morris about walking her down the aisle. Maybe a giant middle finger at her mom, who got left by Fred for Morris ten-plus years ago...but also, the more Sloan tries to get up the nerve to ask him for the favor, a damned good idea. She had Morris as a teacher in the aftermath of The Affair, that turned into the happy marriage. Her Babbitty mother was not likely to be supportive of Sloan spending a lot of time with the happy couple. So she has never really been in close contact with Morris for long, and so does not already know how destroyed he was by Fred's death.

It causes Sloan to stop thinking about her rage at her Babbitty mother to begin to do things with and for Morris, starting with rescuing Jade from the dark corner she was absent-mindedly shoved into and forgotten by grieving Morris. It's how Jade survives, even thrives, as the story unfolds with its very grown-up restructuring of family ties among all these players and more. Todd isn't a flashy or noisy character, yet he loves Sloan enough to get along with her Babbitty mother, her snotty sister, her gross brother and invisible brother-in-law.

Deserves a damn medal, does Todd.

I'll cut the book report short to observe the story continues its gentle way through the different parties as each processes the grief and the inevitable regret of loss sinking in, in the most surprising ways that you can never see coming. A lot of old hurts...Sloan was never the daughter her Babbitty mother wanted her to be, Morris was the love of her Babbitty mother's one great love's life with all the terrible pain that brings, Jade is dealt a violence and fears she will actually die this time...all interleafed very deftly, very structurally appropriately. You don't need to know details until you get there.

I'd say the ending felt...irresolute...but it feels exactly like the endpoints of real-life complex family situations feel. It's not The End, it's the place the strands come together, cross into a knot and start a new strand of everyone's interrelationship. If you liked Remarkably Bright Creatures or Love & Saffron, this will appeal to you.

THE BOY FROM THE SEA, Irish fable-making for this century's needs

THE BOY FROM THE SEA
GARRETT CARR
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

NOMINATED for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award...a longlist of twenty will be announced in February 2026, the shortlist of six in April 2026, the winner(s) in May's festival.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 'Compulsive reading. Compassionate, lyrical and full of devilment' Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

1973. In a close-knit community on Ireland’s west coast, a baby is found abandoned on the beach. Named Brendan Bonnar by Ambrose, the fisherman who adopts him, Brendan will become a source of fascination and hope for a town caught in the storm of a rapidly changing world.

Ambrose, a man more comfortable at sea than on land, brings Brendan into his home out of love. But it’s a decision that will fracture his family and force him to try to understand himself and those he cares for.

Bookended by the arrival and departure of a single mesmerizing boy, Garrett Carr's The Boy From the Sea is an exploration of the ties that make us and bind us, as a family and community move irresistibly towards the future.

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

My Review: Funny thing how kindness skips a generation. Declan, the titular "Boy"'s older sibling, wouldn't know kindness if it fucked him. The elder Bonnar couple love their magical gift of a child..."Parents knew you can never tell how a child will turn out, naturally yours or not. They had learned, fundamentally, every child comes in from the sea, washes up against the ankles of their parents, arms outstretched, ready to be shaped by them but with some disposition already in place, deep-set and never quite knowable"...Brendan, named for the Navigator, that famously fostered child. The boy, like mythical Brendan, never has his own place to take root...thanks, Declan...but instead becomes a source of bemusement in the community.

The narrative is from a godlike omniscient third-person PoV...the godlike, or royal, "we." It's a choice that, while conferring the reader with the advantage of being privy to things a more limited PoV would make awkward to show, removes us from the action. Observing from a distance is always going to slow one down when reading about the intimate life of a community. It did here. There are so many small, mean-souled people in Brendan's world. It doesn't relent, either, when we see his "family"...mother Christine's horrifying sister and father, and unwilling sibling Declan...being so unreservedly awful to him. As though being abandoned in a Moses-like way was somehow his fault, or merited (like any infant deserves abandonment).

So quite a melancholy read for me. As I've come to expect from Irish writers, or the ones who get published in the US anyway, the prose has real lyricism. Unexpectedly it breaks into quotidian musings on things like the EU and its fishing quotas..."He still felt guilty about his comportment with Christine later, as he sat in his car outside the fisheries office. He’d never actually apologize but he’d be extra jovial in their next few encounters; this was how we indicated we were sorry for something we’d said or done: by acting oddly the next time we met you"...and the waning control of the church on peoples' inner lives..."A note on our use of the word ‘grand’ is here required. It might sound like a relative of good or great but in our usage it was something different. ‘Grand’ was how we acknowledged that something wasn’t good or great while also saying nothing could be done and there was no point going on about it"...and eldercare..."Eunan {Christine's ghastly father} was against anything without set purpose and complete predictability and a human tended to fail on these requirements. He was against surprises, he hadn’t allowed a telephone in the house for many years as you never knew when it might ring on you. He mocked anything frivolous: placemats, dessert, having a lie-in, suffering from your nerves. ‘Get away out of that!’ he’d shout at cream cakes and people with hay fever."

What you're getting in this story is not showy, or fast, or loud. It is just like the sea that dominates this Western Irish town. It is quiet and inner-directed, with wild outbursts of damage and trouble, followed by the calmer gift-giving phase again. It is a lovely, involving visit to a lifeway long since altered by the relentlessness of change grown from within anf imposed from without.

I very much enjoyed the story's two-decade time frame. They were the last years of an Ireland now so completely vanished that one would be hard pressed to see it in modern Ireland. An elegy, albeit an emotionally honest one, to the way the country once was, with characters standing in for ways old and new. A read I expect will launch the writer into world notice because it is so plangently plucking heartstrings all the way through.

I don't mean that as a diss, only a recognition. I'm hip to your tricks, Author Carr, and I see how well you're performing them. That earns you a respectful tip-of-the-cap four stars.