Where We Belong (Giffin) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Book clubs will have a field day with this one. Thorny mother-daughter relationships and secrets we keep from loved ones burn up the pages.
USA Today

 
After five charming relationship-themed hits, Emily Giffin had a lot to live up to with Where We Belong.  Luckily, the author executes with a thoughtful finesse that makes this easily her best work yet.  [Where We Belong] is that special type of story that takes priority over getting to bed on time. And the payoff is well worth it.
Boston Globe


The issue about secrets isn’t about keeping them.  It’s the reveal and its consequences.  That’s the challenge faced by the characters in Emily Giffin’s new, briskly paced…Where We Belong.  Taking a somewhat more somber tone than she did in her [previous] bestselling novels, Giffin’s approach and style mature in this latest effort.
Philadelphia Inquirer
 

Emily Giffin ranks as a grand master.  Over the course of five best-selling novels, she has traversed the slippery slopes of true love, lost love, marriage, motherhood, betrayal, forgiveness and redemption that have led her to be called ‘a modern-day Jane Austen.’  With Giffin’s use of humor, honesty, originality and, like Austen, a biting social commentary, this modern-day ‘woman’s novel’ sits easily on nightstands and in beach bags.  Even Austen would find it hard to put down.
Chicago Sun-Times


Emily Giffin’s Where We Belong is a literary Rorschach test.  The book, while thoroughly entertaining, will also prod readers to examine choices they’ve made in their lives.  It will compel them to muse about things they’d like to do over, to do differently, to do better…[and] gracefully examines themes of identity, family and forgiveness.
Miami Herald

 
Emily Giffin has a wonderful way with words.  [Where We Belong] is an emotionally powerful story that will ring true with women who have given a child away and with those who grew up wondering where they came from.  Giffin may be working with a premise and plot that is fairly simple, but there’s nothing lightweight about the emotional turbulence she creates.
Ft. Worth Star-Telegram


Emily Giffin’s new novel about the legacy of adoption, Where We Belong, imagines what happens when an 18-year-old girl tracks down her birth mother…the latest in a string of provocative, imaginative novels that began in 2004 with SOMETHING BORROWED.  All the characters [here] are on a journey to find ‘where we belong,’ and Giffin knits together their journeys with a masterly hand.
Seattle Times


[T]oo suspenseful to be called chick lit and too relationship-centered to be labeled a thriller. But most readers will have little time to think of a genre for Emily Giffin’s latest novel as they race through this gripping story about the reunion of a high school senior and the woman who put her up for adoption 18 years earlier.
Connecticut Post


Graceful and inviting prose, careful plotting and vivid characterizations…The coming together of two people who share a genetic heritage and little else is dramatically and emotionally risky.  But Giffin makes the most of the opportunity, and Where We Belong had me riveted.
Winston-Salem Journal


Kirby Rose turns 18, hops on a Greyhound bus from St. Louis to Manhattan and with no warning, knocks on the Fifth Avenue apartment door of her birth mother, Marian Caldwel.... Giffin's moving storyline offers great pacing, believable, disparate characters and a plot that could easily careen into maudlin territory, unlikable stereotypes or over-the-top emotionalism but never does: a sweet, even-keeled winner
Kirkus Reviews