REVIEW: A Little Ray of Sunshine by Kristan Higgins
A kid walks into your bookstore and… Guess what? He’s your son. The one you put up for adoption eighteen years ago. The one you never told anyone about. Surprise!
And a huge surprise it is.
It’s a huge surprise to his adoptive mother, Monica, who thought she had a close relationship with Matthew, her nearly adult son. But apparently, he felt the need to secretly arrange a vacation to Cape Cod for the summer so he could meet his birth mother…without a word to either her or his dad.
It’s also a surprise— to say the least—to Harlow, the woman who secretly placed her baby for adoption so many years ago. She’s spent the years since then building a quiet life. She runs a bookstore with her grandfather, hangs out with her four younger siblings and is more or less happily single, though she can’t help gravitating toward Grady Byrne, her old friend from high school. He’s moved back to town, three-year-old daughter in tow, no wife in the picture. But she’s always figured her life had to be child-free, so that complicates things.
When Matthew walks into Harlow’s store, she faints. Monica panics. And all their assumptions—about what being a parent really means—explode. This summer will be full of more surprises as both their families are redefined…and as both women learn that for them, there’s no limit to a mother’s love.
Dear Ms. Higgins,
My reading experience with your books has been … spotty. Some have worked well but the amount of &^%# sometimes dumped on the heroines has often been a sore spot for me. In this book, I think everyone got their share of shit, underwent character growth, and came out better on the other side.
Harlow Smith is going about a normal day in the bookstore she partly owns with her beloved grandfather (Grandpop) and with a (distant) third cousin (more on her later) when the bottom drops out from under her. Okay what really happens is two people walk into the store whom she recognizes but neither of whom she’s seen in almost eighteen years. When she “comes to” from her faint, the life of almost everyone in her world has changed and it’s going to take seven months for the fallout, angst, anger, amazement, and growth to finish.
Told in Harlow’s first person POV and the third person POVs of Monica and Cynthia this is a female centered story of motherhood and life changes. It’s 496 pages long and a lot will happen to almost everyone in it.
When Harlow’s family finds out what she did – and didn’t tell them anything about for almost eighteen years – the emotional fit hits the shan. When her son’s adoptive parents discover how he’s gone behind their backs to find Harlow and then manipulated their annual summer vacation to take place on the Cape where she lives, they are stunned and, in the case of mother Monica, devastated. Meanwhile cousin Cynthia is her usual cold and distant self and slightly disdainful of all the fuss going on. She herself was adopted and never once gave a thought to finding her birth-mother. It was her adoptive parents who raised her with love although perhaps not as many life skills as she needed.
Needing reinforcements, Harlow calls in her BFF from college who has remained her ride-and-die friend since then. Rosie is the only other one in Harlow’s life – outside of the Patels who adopted Matthew – who knows the full story. Monica and Sanjay Patel have approached parenting slightly differently with Monica being the high earner and advanced planner while Sanjay is the easy-going teacher who got to be home with the kids while Monica put up with misogynistic crap at her grueling job. Years of thought and care (so many events related to and geared toward adoption) and trying to always prove to Matthew that he is a loved member of the family have seemingly blown up in their faces. Cynthia was raised with “standards” and refuses to lower them but after her rich husband leaves her, her world implodes and she bitterly resents being an also-run background member of the Smith family.
It’s obvious from the start that all three women need to examine their lives. All three will do so but they’ll face the “Higgins authorial wringer” before it’s all said and done. There are issues simmering for all of them. Harlow is suddenly faced with the son whom she has loved every day of his life but whom she has played no role in bringing up. Her family are stunned and hurt at her actions but also ready to open their hearts to this great/grandchild/nephew. Monica has been Matthew’s mother for almost all of his life – there for the good and the (sometimes insolent teenager) bad and his actions have shredded her. But how she and her husband react to what’s happened also opens a few cracks in their parenting styles. When someone contacts Cynthia from out of the blue and someone else begins to pay her attention, she is faced with an emotional turmoil but also possible new outlooks on life.
There are reasons to dislike almost all the characters and most of them do need character growth. I wanted to shake a few but they’re written so that I could also sympathize with them. As Harlow realized then and now, some choices can be both right and wrong. You can try to do the best you know how but will usually have to guess and then live with the consequences. These characters felt real to me and while I mentally shook my head at some of their actions, those also felt as if they were organic to how the characters were written. There is a lot of telling in the book. Past actions need to be laid out but some of this felt excessive to me. Descriptions of the town, shops, restaurants and weekly trivia games meandered on too long. A good 50-100 pages could have been lost. And yet I easily sank into the writing and wanted to know what would happen next. It is much more women’s fiction, with a background romance for two characters that readers will easily clock from the start, but I still sucked it down in two days. B
~Jayne
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I share your sore spot with Higgins’ books. There is much to like in her stories, but, man, the thrashing her female characters take is dispiriting and wrenching. Having said that, I am quite interested in A LITTLE RAY OF SUNSHINE and will look further. Thanks for the review.
@Darlynne: There is less thrashing for Harlow than I’m used to seeing Higgins give her heroines.
Kristan Higgins has been hit or miss for me as well. Too many man-hungry heroines. And in her 2022 release, “Out of the Clear Blue Sky,” the midwife heroine was very judgmental about women who did not choose to have a “natural” birth (i.e., completely medication-free).
@SusanS: Ouch, that midwife character would have put me off, too.
This heroine isn’t man-hungry – more the opposite in fact.
I have this on my TBR. it is the first KH book, I’ve been interested in — gosh I want to say 7 years?
I have really enjoyed Kristan Higgins for years. I think she excels at writing ‘family’ in her books. The interrelationships between the members, and especially the sibling dynamic have always felt so very authentic to me. I liked how she balanced a loving family with some dysfunctional elements.
But I will say my enjoyment of her stuff palled in some later books as each successive book fell into a pattern when the heroine had to be broken down and built back up later. There was the last one I read where the public humiliation was just a bit too much for me. And I pressed pause.
I have been meaning to pick up reading more of her stuff again, hoping that she’d fallen out of that pattern because outside of that I really did love her writing. Like I said, This is the first one in a while where the blurb made me want to read so I am looking forward to it.
@TinaNoir: I hope you enjoy it. It’s the first of her books I’ve read since 2017. And before that, I had an even longer drought. Yes about the breaking down of the heroines. That got me, too.