Book Summary and Reviews of The Emilys by Heather Abel

Book Summary

A mother becomes obsessed with finding the cure to a mysterious ailment that is spreading throughout her New England town in this kaleidoscopic novel about love's capacities in a changing world.

"And if we weren't afraid of the darkness? What world would we make then?"

Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she's frustrated, bored, and above all, lonely when she runs into Demeter, a childhood friend with whom she shared one transformative summer. Demeter is as beautiful and charismatic as Eve remembers, but she's also distraught. Demeter's daughter, like a growing number of others, young and old, cannot go outside during the day. No one knows why, and doctors are skeptical that these people—soon dubbed Emilys, after a famously reclusive local poet—are telling the truth. But Eve believes her friend, whose company revives her and gives her purpose. She will help Demeter—if she can just figure out how.

Eve's search for answers brings her into the fold of an unlikely band of detectives—the local librarian and the town's most prolific writer of letters to the editor, who both loved the same woman and now hate each other; an actor hoping to make amends for past mistakes; a hermit botanist whose seed collection might hold a clue if she'd only open her door. They meet in playdates and potlucks, the Elks Lodge and the food co-op, the botanical garden and the riverbank, venturing deep into the town's past and finding their way towards a future wilder and more wondrous than they had ever expected. But for Eve, this future will require a price: She is keeping secrets from her husband, fighting with Demeter, distracted from her children. What is she willing to risk to find a cure?

The Emilys is a capacious, profound book about how love of all kinds—love between friends, between mothers and kids, between strangers and neighbors, love for the earth—opens up new possibilities. It asks: How will we learn to live in an altered world? How will we keep each other safe? And when the darkness comes, how will we find joy?