"A pitch-perfect depiction of New England campus culture, COVID-era child-rearing and how the complexities of adulthood accumulate." — People, "The Best Books to Read in May"
“An engaging story. . . . as cozy as a rainy summer weekend in midcoast Maine. . . . so true to life.”
— New York Times Book Review
“In this elegantly rendered novel about a long-awaited reunion that doesn’t go as planned, Elise Juska deftly and grippingly explores the richness and complexities of longtime friendships, the anxiety of living in a world that feels perpetually on edge, and the possibilities of community and connection that still somehow remain.” — Lynn Steger Strong, author of Flight and Want
"A beautiful excavation of a liminal time period that united the world in collective vulnerability. . . . Juska has a talent for deeply immersive details and rich character development. Reunion pulls the reader in, as if we too were returning to Walthrop and assessing the state of our life.” — Chicago Review of Books
“Reunion begins with three deftly drawn protagonists reckoning with the past and present in early midlife, and opens out into an interrogation of the future and what it means to be young now. Juska's masterful ending is as startling as it is moving and true.” — Kate Christensen, author of Welcome Home, Stranger
“Three former classmates, one 25th college reunion and a lingering pandemic later, Juska’s third novel makes its own contribution—a solid, thoughtful and wryly funny one—to the annals of friendship literature. . . . This nostalgic, realistic novel squarely hits the mark.” — New York Times, Editors' Choice
“A master of the whip-smart character-driven drama.” — Philadelphia Magazine
“[Juska] totally captured what it feels like to go to your twenty-fifth. . . . I’m emotional about this book. . . . it got me.” — News Center Maine
"Masterful and surprising." — The Philadelphia Citizen
"If a novel is about people approaching fifty, can it still be called a coming-of-age story? After reading Elise Juska’s Reunion, I would argue that it can. I loved this story about the importance of long friendships, especially when life gets difficult in ways we can't imagine when we are young. This is a perfectly crafted page-turner of a novel, full of warmth and wisdom." — Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes and The Half Moon
"Reunion had me hooked from its perfectly tense opening, and kept me enthralled throughout with its masterful storytelling and memorable characters. This is Elise Juska's best book yet." — Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of God of the Woods
“Reunion is a masterful portrayal of the experience of being a parent and human being in a world that seems to be tipping toward the end times. Relatable and riveting.” — Chip Cheek, author of Cape May
“In the appealing latest from Juska (after If We Had Known), three friends attend their 25th college reunion in Maine. . . . Hijinks ensue as the Natty Light flows freely, and long-held secrets work their way to the surface. . . . the characters are well drawn, and Juska does an especially good job of portraying how her cast navigates a new normal. It’s a diverting twist on the Big Chill.” — Publishers Weekly
"Fans of J. Courtney Sullivan’s Maine, Hannah McKinnon's The View From Here, and Jonathan Tropper’s This is Where I Leave You will enjoy Juska's blend of introspection and intrigue. Warm and witty, Reunion makes a delightful case for reconnecting with the people who knew you when you barely knew yourself." — Booklist
"In Elise Juska’s insightful and elegant new novel, three college friends return to the campus they left decades before and are forced to face the hard truth of how their lives have turned out. A beautifully written and skillfully woven tale of what-ifs and what-might-have-beens–I loved it.” — Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year
“Elise Juska’s Reunion is such a wildly vivid snapshot of midlife that you may feel like you're reading your own diary. How wise and deeply humane and tender is this beautifully written story of three old friends who reconnect at a college reunion on the coast of Maine, how laser sharp the dialogue. The subtle knowingness and crystallized moments of connection and longing between mothers and sons, and husbands and wives, and women friends will stop you in your tracks.” — Susan Conley, author of Landslide
“Poignant and humane, Reunion is a campus novel alive to the ways that personality and privilege intertwine to shape an education and a life. Suspenseful, surprising, and moving all the way through." — Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back
“A deftly written page-turner that kept me up way beyond my bedtime for several days to find out what would happen to Juska's characters. So relatably human and touching, this novel had me riveted until the very last sentence.” — Caitlin Shetterly, author of Pete and Alice in Maine
“A vivid, engrossing read. . . . The idyllic beauty of a Maine college campus is the perfect backdrop for Juska’s characters to reconnect with each other and with who they were in another era, to attempt to distance themselves from the secrets and struggles of the lives they’ve left behind, and to feel both the comfort and the pain of nostalgia.” — Katie Runde, author of The Shore
"Elise Juska is so good at describing people, places, and moments that you not only picture them, you feel them."
— Curtis Sittenfeld
Praise for The Blessings: "There's no shortage of novels about the quirks and tragedies of large families, but The Blessings is a uniquely poignant, prismatic look at an Irish-Catholic clan as it rallies after losing one of its own." — Entertainment Weekly
"A bighearted novel. . . . Juska's moving, multifaceted portrait of the Blessing family gleams like a jewel." — The Philadelphia Inquirer
"In the tradition of Elizabeth Berg's and Alice McDermott's work, The Blessings is a knowing portrait of a sprawling Irish-American family in Philly across the last thirty years, in all their shared strength and separate weaknesses. Elise Juska is deft and tender, letting us get close to her characters in their most vulnerable moments. The ties that bind are never simple, and often painful, but as one daughter acknowledges, 'these are the hidden intimacies, the private exchanges, on which she builds her life.'" — Stewart O'Nan
"Several generations of the Blessings, a Philadelphia-based, Irish-American family, come beautifully to life in a deceptively simple tale that examines the foibles, disappointments and passions that tie family members together. . . The author brings a depth of understanding to the human condition. . . . the reader leaves feeling lucky to have spent some time in their presence."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Juska's compelling narrative tackles complex issues about society's judgment of and responsibility for others."
— Shelf Awareness
Praise for If We Had Known: "A tender, whip-smart meditation on the origins and aftermath of tragedy. Here Juska asks us an important and quietly devastating question: In what ways are we responsible to and for each other?"
— Carmen Maria Machado, author of the National Book Award Finalist Her Body and Other Parties
"What a gripping and wise book this is."
— Robin Black, author of Life Drawing
2024-02-03
Heightened emotional tensions caused by Covid-19 add an interesting twist to Juska’s story of friends gathering for a college reunion in 2021.
The framework is familiar: Adults with unsatisfactory lives attend a reunion where they interact with people they once loved, hated, admired, or were mean to; recognizing the dissonance between themselves then and now leads to inner growth. But Covid has forced members of Walthrop’s class of 1995 to return to the Maine liberal arts college one year late for their 25th reunion. Between drinking beer and making jokey banter about youthful antics, the gathered characters evoke Americans’ post-lockdown mood of exhaustion and general unease. Hope, Polly, and Adam, the three friends who take turns narrating, were famously close in college. Although they’ve stayed in touch, their lives have diverged. Hope, once a self-confident student, has become an anxious stay-at-home suburban mom who pretends tense undercurrents in her family life don’t exist. (Her charmingly snarky teenage daughter is the book’s most entertaining character.) Fellow students had considered Polly intimidatingly cool, but as a working-class Brooklyn girl she “often felt like an outlier” at preppy Walthrop; now an adjunct college instructor, she lives back in Brooklyn with her teenage son, Jonah, and has never told Hope, her supposed best friend, the truth about Jonah’s conception or his father’s identity. Dangerously wild in college, environmental lawyer Adam has evolved into a devoted family man in rural New Hampshire, but the deepening depression and agoraphobia his wife has exhibited since Covid are growing burdens. As the weekend progresses, the three friends mostly avoid delving below the surface of things until events bring each to a point of crisis and they begin reconnecting. The problem is that, given their undiscussed, long-standing resentments, the two women’s friendship is never convincing, and maintaining their relationships never seems a high priority to Adam. What works in this novel is how Juska keeps the Covid cloud hovering in readers’ minds without overkill.
A pleasant but predictable read.
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