book review for hello beautiful

Book Review: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

By: Author Luka

Posted on Last updated: June 14, 2024

Categories Book Reviews

Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful is a beautiful and heart-wrenching novel that explores the complex and multifaceted nature of love, family, and loyalty. The novel draws inspiration from Louisa May Alcott’s timeless classic, Little Women, and presents a moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.

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Summary | Characters

Book Review | Book Club Questions

The story follows William Waters, who grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. But when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman year of college, it’s as if the world has lit up around him. With Julia comes her family, as she and her three sisters are inseparable. With the Padavanos, William experiences a newfound contentment, and every moment in their house is filled with loving chaos.

However, darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?

Napolitano has created a rich and complex cast of characters, each with their own unique personality, strengths, and flaws. The Padavano sisters are finely described, and it’s entirely plausible that the girls envision themselves from time to time as the March sisters from Little Women. The presence of a dreamy, poetic father and a hardworking, long-suffering mother also adds to this parallel.

At the center of the story is William, who is a beautifully flawed character that readers can’t help but feel for. He grows up with no memory of his sister, Caroline, a lovable redhead who died at age three when he was a mere six days old. Her absence engulfs his early years, and her death has left his parents emotionally frozen and unable, or unwilling, to forge even a cursory connection with their remaining child. Overlooked and neglected at home, William’s only solace becomes his love of basketball. The sole place he feels comfortable is a court with a hoop, and his social contacts are mostly limited to his school teammates, who watch with amazement as he reaches the towering height of 6-foot-7.

As the novel progresses, William’s character develops, and we witness the slow and painful decline of his mental health. He gradually sinks into a crippling depression that ultimately results in the breakdown of his marriage to Julia and his distancing from their infant daughter, Alice. Relationships between and among William and all of the Padavanos rupture and realign over the ensuing decades as Napolitano spins a saga of familial love, deception, and hope for healing while adeptly highlighting each family member’s unique position in the narrative.

One of the main themes of the book is the complexity of familial relationships and how love can both damage and heal families. Napolitano’s exploration of the Padavano family, in particular, is incredibly moving, and the way she portrays their relationships with each other is both authentic and heart-wrenching. The Padavano sisters are all unique, with their own quirks and personalities, but they share an unbreakable bond that allows them to weather the storms that come their way.

Another theme of the book is the power of forgiveness. The characters in the book all make mistakes, but Napolitano shows that it’s possible to move past those mistakes and find redemption. This is especially true for William, who spends much of the book carrying the weight of his past mistakes. But as he begins to confront his demons and make amends for his actions, he finds a sense of peace that he’s been missing for years.

Napolitano’s writing style is captivating and lyrical, and her descriptions of the characters’ emotions and inner turmoil are incredibly poignant. The novel is filled with beautiful prose that is both poetic and insightful. The influence of Walt Whitman is felt throughout the book, from epigraph to end, as characters come to terms with their roles in an evolving universe.

The ending of the book is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Without giving too much away, I will say that Napolitano does an excellent job of wrapping up the various storylines while still leaving the reader with a sense of possibility. The characters in the book have all been through so much, but they’ve also grown and changed, and there’s a sense that they’ll be able to move forward with their lives.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, Hello Beautiful is an emotionally charged and compelling novel that explores the complexities of love, loss, and family. Ann Napolitano’s writing style is masterful, and her ability to create realistic characters and evoke deep emotions in readers is commendable. She has a way of capturing the beauty and tragedy of life and presenting it in a way that is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.

The novel is a poignant reminder that life is fragile and that our relationships with others can either lift us up or tear us down. It is a story about the enduring power of family and the lengths to which we will go to protect those we love. As the author writes in the book, “Family is a kind of love that has nothing to do with romance, nothing to do with obligation, nothing to do with blood.”

If you’re looking for a book that will touch your heart, make you think deeply about life, and leave you feeling a range of emotions, then Hello Beautiful is definitely worth reading. It’s a story that will stay with you long after you’ve turned the final page.

I love to read and I enjoy exploring a range of genres including contemporary and historical fiction, mysteries, thrillers, nonfiction, and memoirs. If you would like me to review your book, feel free to reach out to me!

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Oprah’s pick, ‘Hello Beautiful,’ is a tender tearjerker

It’s easy to see why Ann Napolitano’s novel was chosen: like her previous book, “Dear Edward,” this one chronicles life’s highs and lows with precision

In her piercingly tender new novel, “ Hello Beautiful , ” best-selling author Ann Napolitano catalogues the multitudes of love and hurt that families contain, and lays bare their powers to both damage and heal. If that description echoes the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose work Napolitano quotes in her epigraph, it also reflects her own expansive literary spirit — a bracing yet restorative sensibility that managed to render cathartic the seemingly unbearable pain embedded in her previous book, “ Dear Edward . ” Now being dramatized on Apple TV Plus, that story recounts the physical and psychological recovery of the 12-year-old title character who boards a jetliner with his family and becomes the flight’s sole survivor.

In ‘Dear Edward,’ the world’s most famous orphan finds something to live for

Like its predecessor, “Hello Beautiful” will make you weep buckets because you come to care so deeply about the characters and their fates. At its center is another ailing soul, the emotionally hobbled William Waters. He grows up with no memory of his sister, Caroline, a lovable redhead who died at age 3 when he was a mere 6 days old. Her absence engulfs his early years, her death having left his parents emotionally frozen and unable, or unwilling, to forge even a cursory connection with their remaining child.

Overlooked and neglected at home, William’s only solace becomes his love of basketball. The sole place he feels comfortable is a court with a hoop, and his social contacts are mostly limited to his school teammates, who watch with amazement as he reaches the towering height of 6-foot-7. When the sports scholarship he earns to Northwestern University allows him to leave his lonely home for the Chicago area, his parents bid him farewell, seeming not to care whether they ever see him again.

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He arrives on campus insecure, awkward and lost. He’s as little able to comprehend the inner hollowness and guilt he has struggled with for as long as he can remember as he is to imagine a future beyond the basketball court. For a time, his spot on the varsity team’s starting lineup keeps him afloat. So does a fiancee who tows him along without his realizing that their destinations aren’t necessarily compatible. But by the time a severe knee injury sidelines him, he has already begun to sink. After playing the game he knew by the rules and routines that life had presented him, he finds that he’s drowning. There is no game left for him to play, no purpose in trying to pivot on his wounded knee and search for something else.

Napolitano charts his descent with aching precision. She also puts in place two disparate teams to help him: a stolid group of basketball jocks, captained by Kent and Arash, who become his true brothers; and the quirky Padavano sisters, who grow into his family.

He meets Julia, the oldest sister, in a college history class, and she soon introduces him to her three siblings. At first, he finds them indistinguishable, each sporting the same unruly curly hair, and in person, as in old photos, looking “deeply similar, like they were four different versions of the same person.”

Only on closer acquaintance does William begin to discern their differences. Charming and energetic, Julia is also bossy, controlling and ambitious. Sylvie is younger than Julia by 10 months and is her closest confidante, but she is contrastingly soft-spoken, bookish (she works at the local library to put herself through college) and romantic, dreaming of a perfect soul mate even as she makes out with random boys in the library stacks. The two youngest siblings are decidedly nonidentical twins: Cecilia, a budding artist and mural painter who becomes a single mother at 17, and the nurturing Emeline, who “kept her hands free in order to be helpful or to pick up and soothe a neighborhood child.”

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Over the course of three decades, the siblings will mature and change, and their seemingly solid sisterhood will be repeatedly challenged. Yet they always remain recognizable, their flaws and limits as deeply rooted as their capacity for kindness and compassion. Even so, plot coincidences can pile up along the way, and the Padavanos themselves comment on the soap-opera twists that discomfort and reconfigure their relationships. Countering that, Napolitano incorporates knowledgeable interludes about basketball history and strategy throughout her novel.

Napolitano emphasizes the sisters’ fondness for likening themselves to the four heroines of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women . ” But the siblings put me more in mind of the unconventional families Anne Tyler often portrays in her novels. Like Tyler’s characters, who can sometimes hardly bear to go beyond the comfort zone of their Baltimore neighborhood, the Padavanos stay mostly in Pilsen, their beloved working-class corner of Chicago. Both novelists also share a fondness for oddball details, such as mother Rose Padavano’s idiosyncratic gardening gear, which consists of a baseball catcher’s uniform and a flamboyant sombrero. Whitman’s encompassing vision of life and death also wafts through the novel, courtesy of favorite lines quoted by Rose’s ne’er-do-well husband, Charlie.

But Napolitano’s voice is her own. Like her deeply felt characters, she compels us to contemplate the complex tapestry of family love that can, despite grief and loss, still knit us together. She helps us see ourselves — and each other — whole.

Diane Cole is the author of the memoir “ After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges .”

Hello Beautiful

By Ann Napolitano

Dial. 400 pp. $28

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HELLO BEAUTIFUL

by Ann Napolitano ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2023

Napolitano’s characters can break your heart as they work to mend their own.

Who do we deserve to love and be loved by?

Drawn into the orbit of a tightknit family upon falling for Julia, the eldest of the four Padavano sisters, William Waters experiences the kind of family solidarity, affection, and sense of belonging he never had with his own dysfunctional parents. William developed an (initially) effective coping strategy during his lonely childhood and devotes his energies toward succeeding in the only place he feels comfortable: the basketball court. College sweethearts, Julia and William marry and begin a life together directed mostly by Julia’s wishes for stability and status; the plan and relationship are derailed by William’s gradual decline into a crippling depression. Julia and William divorce, and William distances himself from their infant daughter, Alice, too. Relationships between and among William and all of the Padavanos rupture and realign over the ensuing decades as Napolitano spins a saga of familial love, deception, and hope for healing while adeptly highlighting each family member’s unique position in the narrative. Each of the Padavano girls is finely described—there's Julia, who's straightforward and driven; Sylvie, dreamy and romantic; and twins Cecelia (artistic) and Emeline (the sensitive moral compass of the group)—and it is entirely plausible that the girls envision themselves from time to time as the March sisters from Little Women . (Rounding out that parallel is the presence of a dreamy, poetic father and a hardworking, long-suffering mother.) More subtly, the influence of Walt Whitman is felt throughout the book, from epigraph to end, as characters come to terms with their roles in an evolving universe. As in Napolitano’s recent Dear Edward (2020), heartbreaking circumstances shatter the lives of relatable human characters who are unprepared for the task of building a meaningful life.

Pub Date: March 14, 2023

ISBN: 9780593243722

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Dial Press

Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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INTO THE UNCUT GRASS

by Trevor Noah ; illustrated by Sabina Hahn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2024

A sweet bedtime story.

A boy and his stuffed bear head into the woods.

Having captured readers’ attention with Born a Crime (2016), his bestselling memoir of growing up in South Africa, comedian and television host Noah has written a parable about decision-making. As he puts it in a brief prologue, “It’s about disagreements and difference—but it’s also about how we bridge those gaps and find what matters most, whether we’re parents or kids, neighbors, gnomes, or political adversaries. It’s a picture book, but it’s not a children’s book. Rather, it is a book for kids to share with parents and for parents to share with kids.” With plentiful illustrations by Hahn and in language aimed at young listeners, it tells the story of a small boy so impatient to start his Saturday adventures that he rebels against the rules of his household and heads out without brushing his teeth or making his bed, despite the reminders of his stuffed bear, Walter. “We can’t just run away,” protests the bear. “Your mother will miss you. And where will we sleep? And who will make us waffles?” “We’ll build our own house,” the boy responds. “And we’ll grow our own waffles!” From there, the pair go on their walkabout, encountering a garden gnome, a pair of snails, and a gang of animated coins who have lessons to offer about making choices. Though the author suggests in the introduction that adult readers might enjoy the book on their own, those looking for a follow-up to the memoir or a foray into adult fiction should be warned that this is not that book.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024

ISBN: 9780593729960

Page Count: 128

Publisher: One World/Random House

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | GENERAL FICTION

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