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Book Summary and Reviews of All the Little Houses by May Cobb

All the Little Houses by May Cobb

All the Little Houses

A Novel

by May Cobb

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  • Published:
  • Jan 2026, 480 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the author of The Hunting Wives comes a deliciously wicked new thriller about mean girls, mean moms, and the delicious secrets inside all the little houses.

Adults can behave badly too...

It's the mid-1980s in the tiny town of Longview, Texas. Nellie Anderson, the beautiful daughter of the Anderson family dynasty, has burst onto the scene. She always gets what she wants. What she can't get for herself… well, that's what her mother is for. Because Charleigh Andersen, blond, beautiful, and ruthlessly cunning, remembers all too well having to claw her way to the top. When she was coming of age on the poor side of East Texas, she was a loser, an outcast, humiliated, and shunned by the in-crowd, whose approval she'd so desperately thirsted for. When a prairie-kissed family moves to town, all trad wife, woodworking dad, wholesome daughter vibes, Charleigh's entire self-made social empire threatens to crumble.

Who will be left standing when the dust settles?

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"A striving Texas mother gets mixed up in violent business in this juicy thriller...[an] intricate tale of secrets and lies." ―Publishers Weekly

"It's East Texas in the 1980s, and the only ones misbehaving more than the teenagers are the adults...Every character inhabits a moral gray area, stuck and struggling with secret desires, resentments, and plans. Cobb may claim Little House on the Prairie as an inspiration―but this is more Desperate Housewives." ―Kirkus Reviews

"The novel begins with a body floating in the lake and ends with a stunning reveal of who has killed whom after a series of shocking events...Readers will be glued to the page, gawking at the messes Cobb's characters make." ―Library Journal

"Readers know from the opening that someone ends up dead, and they'll keep the pages turning to find out who in this sudsy soap, which has plenty in common with Cobb's breakout book, [The Hunting Wives]." ―Booklist

"All the Little Houses is May Cobb's most explosive book yet. And trust me, that's saying a lot." ―Jeneva Rose, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"Nobody does explosive and twisted like May Cobb does it. She's in a league of her own." ― Lisa Jewell, #1 NYT Bestselling Author of Don't Let Him In

This information about All the Little Houses was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

May Cobb

May Cobb is the bestselling of The Hunting Wives, a series currently available on Netflix, as well as All The Little Houses, The Hollywood Assistant, My Summer Darlings, A Likeable Woman, and Big Woods. Her books have received attention from Book of The Month, The Today Show, O, The Oprah Magazine, and more. She has an M.A. from San Francisco State University and her essays and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Texas Highways, and more. She lives in Austin with her family.

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