ALL THE THINGS WE DON'T TALK ABOUT

A mother’s sudden return forces the lives of a father and child into turmoil.

Morgan Flowers, who’s nonbinary, is used to being their neurodivergent father Julian’s emotional caretaker. What Morgan isn’t used to is putting their own wants and needs first. Enter Sadie Gardner, a fellow scholarship student at Morgan’s elite private school, who, much to Morgan’s shock, finds Morgan desirable. Things seem to be going well for Morgan until their mother, Zoe, who struggles with addiction and had taken off years before, comes tearing back into their life like a tornado, showing up unexpectedly at their front door. Thus the careful equilibrium Morgan has worked so hard to maintain comes crashing down: “You need to leave right now, Dad repeated once Morgan rushed him inside. You need to leave right now, Dad repeated while Morgan unzipped his coat and untied his shoes and helped him upstairs and gathered the weighted blanket and laid him down on the bed.” On top of Zoe’s sudden return, Morgan also finds themselves dealing with a blossoming friendship with an internet stranger who thinks they are someone else, the lingering loss of Morgan’s grandmother, whose cardigan still sits on the back of a chair in the house, and a father whose desperate internal desire to love and protect Morgan is followed up with little action. While Feltman’s narrative is, at times, clouded by too much attention given to the lives of secondary and tertiary characters, the complex relationship between Morgan and Julian places this novel solidly in the category of worthwhile reads.

A multidimensional family drama.