Hello Beautiful is a novel that takes place over four decades. It starts with the birth of William in 1960. Days after William is born, his older sister dies leaving William to be brought up in a cold household where he is ignored by his grieving parents. William’s finds joy in basketball because it is the first time he is acknowledged and included in a group. He gets good enough that he is offered a scholarship to Northwestern where he meets Julia. She is the opposite of William in many ways: short, ambitious, full of life. She is also from a close-knit working-class family where she has three younger sisters and two present parents. In some ways, Julia and William complement each other because he is so lost, and she is so sure of herself. But it’s the thing that draws them together that ultimately drives them apart.

Spoiler alert:

Julia and William get married right after college as part of Julia’s life plan. After they have a child Julia realizes she can’t be parenting William and their daughter. William realizes that Julia, like everybody else in his life, doesn’t really love him. He also realizes that he will not be a pro basketball player and there’s nothing else he’s good at or interested in. One night William walks out on Julia and their baby and tries to drown himself in a lake. Julia’s sister, Sylvie, realizes something might be wrong. She gathers his old teammates to start a search party for him. Julia and the other Padavano sisters are too caught up in their anger with William to care or understand why Sylvie does.

One of the things I like about this book is that each character, aside from William, is often so resolute in the lines they draw that they force a moral question. Is Sylvie right to have formed a relationship with her sister’s ex-husband? Is Julia right to cut off not only Sylvie but her other two sisters? Can we still cheer for William when he abandoned his daughter? These are the questions the readers and the characters grapple with over the next few decades as the novel winds to 2008 where William and Julia’s grown-up daughter, Alice, is discovering the family Julia removed herself from so long ago. No matter who you side with in the moment, you come away with the understanding that life is messy and complicated and short and full of curveballs.

Hello Beautiful is about family and sisterhood and grief and how things that seem so clear to us blur over time. One of my favorite lines is “…just because you never thought about someone didn’t mean they weren’t inside you.” It’s meant to signify that even though William didn’t talk to his parents and his parents didn’t talk about his deceased sister, they were still a part of his life story. This is also true about Julia and her estranged sisters and Alice and the father she’s never met but resembles. The lines that connect people are permanent. Even when they lay slack for so long, they can still reel in two people with shared history.