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In Sickness and In Health
Reviewing Hello Beautiful
Ann Napolitano’s new novel, Hello Beautiful (The Dial Press 2023), follows a set of four sisters through the turbulence of life in Chicago, their home. It’s a work of beginnings and endings, as the characters themselves understand — and most of these endings will occur at the very moment of their beginning and on the same day (day after day), which reminds me a bit of T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding.”
How do we begin to know our true selves before we end?
And it’s also true that in the act of beginning/ending, the sisters and the man who marries two of them, and the daughter who believes for over twenty years that her father is dead (he isn’t; he’s just renounced all rights to her), will come to know themselves if not for the very first time, then at least in time, and maybe in time enough to find other forms of love that are just as deep and now even wider than they’ve known before.
The four sisters — Julia, Sylvie, plus the twins, Cecelia, and Emeline — understand that they have some Little Women in them. Which is which and who is who are questions up for debate, and I won’t give anything away except to tell you that one of them is definitely Jo, though sometimes I think they all are Jo, because as Napolitano describes them toward the end, the sisters are a whole; they complement…