Review: A Little Hope

A Little Hope, by Ethan Joella (Scribner 2021)

First line: “Freddie Tyler wakes at six and watches her sleeping husband breathe for a moment.”

This little debut novel feels like a warm hug… after a swift punch in the gut.

In A Little Hope, Joella offers slice-of-life vignettes of a whole host of characters living in small town Connecticut over the course of a year. Some characters get two or three chapters devoted to their perspectives, many see only one. But the reader gets the pleasure of seeing how these characters all connect as their stories and lives overlap in tender and heartwarming ways. This novel is not for the faint of heart though, as before their hopeful endings, they see a lot of emotional turmoil and pain, through cancer diagnoses, deaths of children, pregnancy loss, infidelity, addiction, and regret.

At times, the grief and pain all felt like a lot — like, really, Joella? More devastation? And the moments of hope and joy had a tendency toward sappiness. And yet, I couldn’t get enough of this novel. I read it very quickly (an unheard of reality for print books in my last few months), and would have read more. I loved getting inside these characters’ minds, seeing how different they were, while all still just trying their best to figure out life. There wasn’t an unlikable character in the bunch, no villains found here, which felt like a balm in our increasingly polarized reality where it seems like a villain lurks around every corner.

Joella has another novel, A Quiet Life, coming out at the end of the month, which seems very similar in content, tone, and style, and I’ve been seeing great reviews for that one too.