book review of hello beautiful

It’s Like ‘Little Women’ — but With Basketball

In “Hello Beautiful,” Ann Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic story of four sisters.

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• Published March 11, 2023 Updated Nov. 1, 2023
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HELLO BEAUTIFUL, by Ann Napolitano

“It is your God-given right as an American fiction writer,” Ursula K. Le Guin once said, to change point of view. But “you need to know that you’re doing it,” she warned, and “some American fiction writers don’t.”

Ann Napolitano certainly does. Taken together, her four novels, published over a span of nearly two decades, might be read as a career-long experiment in point of view. Each book fits the perspectives of its vibrant characters to the moral arcs of their stories in new and beguiling ways.

Napolitano’s debut novel, “ Within Arm’s Reach ,” included no fewer than six first-person points of view across three generations of an Irish Catholic family, each rendered in present tense yet with minute differences of register and tone. She followed up with “A Good Hard Look,” which enlisted Flannery O’Connor as part of a rich ensemble cast rendered in a close third person that perfectly suits the book’s themes of estrangement and desire.

Napolitano’s blockbuster third novel, “ Dear Edward ,” took more technical risks with point of view. One timeline roams through the cabin of an airplane in a daringly head-hopping third person as the doomed jet hurtles toward its fate. The relentless switches in perspective channel the unfolding catastrophe — until finally the narrative mirror breaks, and “the cockpit voice recorder stops” along with the little world the author has built inside the fuselage. The second timeline features the single point of view of Edward, the crash’s sole survivor, who floats in an eerie present tense between memory and oblivion.

There is a silent alchemy to point of view. The unsettling omniscience at the opening of Celeste Ng’s “ Little Fires Everywhere ,” the sublime rupture of perspective delivered a third of the way through Sarah Waters’s “ Fingersmith ”: In the hands of a great novelist, point of view can transport us from an eagle’s eye to a child’s mind to a victim’s dying thoughts in a flash.

“Hello Beautiful,” Napolitano’s radiant and brilliantly crafted new novel, begins in 1960 with the birth of a boy — though with an immediately tragic twist that is also a negation: “For the first six days of William Waters’s life, he was not an only child.” Though William himself won’t come to understand its implications for many years, the childhood death of his older sister will go on to shape his life in fundamental ways. His relationship with his shattered parents is cold and distant; he’s stuck with a mother who scarcely listens when he speaks, and a heartbreakingly remote father (“With his daughter gone, the man’s face never opened again”). By the time William leaves for college, he understands “that they’d only ever had one child, and it wasn’t him.”

William finds refuge and kin in basketball. First spotted by a gym teacher in fifth grade, and talented (and tall) enough by his freshman year to start for the varsity team, he eventually wins a scholarship to Northwestern University, and goes on to spend the rest of his life in Chicago — though “Hello Beautiful” isn’t a typical sports novel, tracing the predictable arc of an elite athlete’s triumph, downfall and redemption. William’s basketball career is sidetracked by mediocrity, failure and devastating injury, but it’s also buoyed by lifelong camaraderie with teammates who will help sustain him through his most difficult moments.

William’s fortunes turn for the better with his marriage to Julia, eldest of the four Padavano sisters, whose warm family offers him the kind of raucous and love-filled life his aloof parents could never provide. At the same time, Julia, a perfectionist with a 10-year plan, has certain expectations for William (perhaps he’ll be a writer, perhaps a professor) that set him up for another kind of failure.

At first all seems well, thanks in no small part to the warmhearted Sylvie, Julia’s bookishly romantic sister, who envisions herself as the impassioned heroine of a 19th-century novel and finds a model for later maturity in Walt Whitman’s “different attempts at excellence and beauty as he aged and loved and reconsidered everything.”

In a marvelous early scene, Julia and her sisters argue over their parallels to the fictional March girls in “Little Women.” As the eldest and most practical, Julia seems the logical Meg, though she and Sylvie both claim themselves as “the feisty Jo, and they were both right.” This is a clear sign of trouble, as is the scene’s hint of tragedy to come: “Whenever any of the sisters was sick or forlorn, she’d declare herself Beth. One of us will be the first to die , they would take turns telling one another, and all four girls shuddered at the thought.”

The italicized truism does its work, darkening the sisters’ youthful exuberance with misfortunes on the novel’s horizons both near and distant: an attempted suicide, alienation and betrayal, divorce, disease, early death. These are recurring themes in Napolitano’s work, which resists the easy satisfactions of the sentimental and never settles for simple answers to emotional predicaments faced by her characters.

Such quandaries help frame the book’s elegant structure. Chapters move along in the braided perspectives of William, Julia and Sylvie in an unvarying pattern that breaks only at the novel’s midpoint, as William and Julia’s marriage falls apart. Julia twice leaves us for seven chapters at a time, during her self-imposed exile from the Chicago Padavanos for a new life and successful career in New York with Alice, the daughter she shares with William.

Though only a handful of chapters come from Alice’s point of view, the first lands like an emotional grenade, beginning with a brutal if necessary fable about her origins and estrangement from her father — a lie Julia will repeat throughout her childhood. Upon hearing it for the first time, the little girl, only 5, reacts with the kind of understated stolidity she has inherited from William: “Alice put down her spoon and said, ‘Oh.’”

Though William gets the plurality of chapters, he is the haziest character of the bunch, adept in the game of emotional distancing taught him by his parents. At times, like his best friend and former teammate Kent, you want to shake the guy by the shoulders and show him everything he has going for him. “You can’t hide love,” Kent warns; William will learn this lesson too slowly. By the end of the novel (no spoilers), William is allowed to break through the emotional chrysalis Napolitano has created for him, finding a potential source of resilience in the very tragedies that have narrowed his life.

In a poignant final scene, he observes that sometimes we need a change in perspective to show us the difficult truths of our own stories — and to help us understand the limits of our own outlooks and angles on the world. Here, just as the novel resolves its key emotional conflict, Napolitano comments slyly on the affective capacity of shifting point of view.

Sometimes, William Waters says, “we need another pair of eyes.”

Bruce Holsinger teaches at the University of Virginia. His most recent novel is “The Displacements.”

HELLO BEAUTIFUL | By Ann Napolitano | 400 pp. | The Dial Press | $28

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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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by Kristin Hannah

PERSPECTIVES

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.

This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9780385550369

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Percival Everett

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Ann Napolitano on her new novel 'Hello Beautiful'

Scott Simon

Lennon Sherburne

Estrangement and reconciliation in an Italian-American family: Ann Napolitano's new novel, "Hello Beautiful," is about loving each other just as we are. NPR's Scott Simon talks to her about it.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

William Waters finds a missing piece of life when he meets Julia Padavano in college and marries into a family of four sisters. He'd grown up feeling that his parents had only one child, and, in Ann Napolitano's memorable phrase, it wasn't him. The embrace of sisters, often comforting, sometimes stifling, forgiving, forgetting and going on is at the heart of her new novel, "Hello Beautiful." Ann Napolitano, author of the bestseller "Dear Edward," which is now an Apple Plus series, joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

ANN NAPOLITANO: Thank you so much for having me.

SIMON: Tell us about William. He has to grow up with a darkness, doesn't he?

NAPOLITANO: Yes. His 3-year-old sister dies the same week that he is born. And his parents are so heartbroken that when they look at him, they only feel their own pain, so they really stop looking at him. And he has very little attention and love for the rest of his childhood.

SIMON: He does eventually find achievement and recognition in basketball. He winds up going to Northwestern, where he meets Julia. I will note the Wildcats are better than usual this year, but they're not a traditional basketball powerhouse. Let's put it that way. Does knowing Julia give him another kind of recognition too?

NAPOLITANO: Yes. She is a powerful, ambitious, self-directed, vibrant young woman, and she sort of takes him in hand and tells him what to do because she has strong aspirations for her own life. She has an idea of the husband that she wants to be married to. And he fits the mold, and he's also very moldable. And he's very happy to be told what to do, so it works out well initially for both of them.

SIMON: And tell us about her sisters. You have Sylvie and then the twins, Cecelia and Emeline.

NAPOLITANO: Yes. So Sylvie is only 10 months younger than Julia, and she is a voracious reader, and she works in the local library, putting herself through college. And she is a dreamer. She has this dream that she's going to find the great love affair, a sort of once-in-a-generation love story. And that is her dream. And Emeline and Cecelia are a little bit younger, and they are twins. And Cecelia is an artist, and Emeline is a nurturer. She takes care of everybody.

SIMON: How challenging is it to write four characters who appear again and again and make them different enough to tell apart, but also enough alike to be sisters?

NAPOLITANO: Well, that's part of what fascinates me about sisters. When I was growing up, my best friend, Leah (ph) - her mother had six sisters that would come in and out of the house all the time, and they had slightly different versions of the same face, and they seemed more themselves when they're in the same room together than they did when they were separated. And that was completely fascinating to me. So it was really, like, an exciting and fun challenge to create sisters who were that close but also very strongly rooted in their own selves. I think that's a challenging relationship because you're so close and so strong-willed and so different, but it can be, like, the deepest and most rewarding of relationships, you know, unless you're challenged, which unfortunately - or fortunately - the sisters are challenged.

SIMON: And it's perfectly OK if readers detect a debt to "Little Women" in your novel.

NAPOLITANO: It is. I actually didn't intend that. It was only once I'd created - or met - the sisters, and they were having a conversation in the scene that I was writing about which March sister they were most like. And I was like, oh, yes, of course. Like, it's four sisters, just like the March girls. And Laurie in "Little Women" is a character from the outside who peers into the March family window and wants to be in there. And so does William for the Padavano sisters.

SIMON: Yeah. William and Julia, without giving away too much of the story, have a daughter, Alice, and then a darkness begins to envelop William. Or has it always been there?

NAPOLITANO: I think it had always been there. I think basketball kept it at bay. And he, you know, reaches the end of his basketball career, and it sort of begins to sink him. And he enters adulthood with its, you know, myriad responsibilities and calls upon him to sort of stand up straighter. And he finds that he's unable to.

SIMON: Yeah. How does William begin to treat his daughter?

NAPOLITANO: I think he has struggles to look at his daughter, in a similar way that his parents struggled to look at him. I think often the sort of traumas that afflict us in our youth end up playing out in various ways as we grow up, even though it's the last thing that we want to have happen. And William wants nothing but the best for his daughter, but he has a lot of fear at the same time.

SIMON: Do we inherit only the good stuff?

NAPOLITANO: No.

SIMON: Yeah.

NAPOLITANO: Unfortunately not. I think the fault lines that run through our parents often run into us, even if we weren't alive when those fault lines were created. And they become part of our DNA and our behaviors. Even if we're trying as hard as we can to run away from them, they are, in that instance, still shaping our lives. The same thing happens with the Padavano family. Rose, the mother of the four girls, got pregnant before she was married, which ended up being, you know, a wonderful thing for their family, but she does not want that for her girls. And she ends up, you know, pushing them almost to the brink. So what she sees as her failures she almost makes happen again in the next generation too.

SIMON: How much of the - may I ask? - family dynamics do you plot out, say, on index cards, and how much come to you in the process of writing?

NAPOLITANO: The first year, while I'm thinking about the book, I don't let myself write, and I only think and plan and research and take notes. But still, there's probably only about five things that I know are going to happen when I start writing the book. The rest of it, I discover.

SIMON: Help us understand what that feels like.

NAPOLITANO: Well, to me, it's kind of like being a reader. It is an act of discovery. When the book starts, William is this lonely, sad, brokenhearted little boy. And I want to find out if he can be OK after the childhood that he had. And I really wasn't sure. So I had to walk through line after line, scene after scene, interaction after interaction and be like, is this true? Like, is this how it would feel? And slowly that charts his course through the story and through the novel. And I'm right there with him, hoping that we're going to get to a place where he's all right but not sure whether that is going to be true or not. And that's part of the tension for me and keeps me writing and keeps me anxious.

SIMON: Forgive me for not knowing, but do you have sisters, brothers?

NAPOLITANO: Yeah, I have a sister, a brother and a half sister.

SIMON: No matter what issues might wind up dividing siblings, is there a - is there still a special closeness that just is in no other way emulated?

NAPOLITANO: Yes. I think because you grow up, obviously, from the very beginning and you know each other inside and out and you know all of each other's embarrassing secrets and worst moments and you know each other at each stage of your lives, there's just a - that's like a rooting system that runs all the way down into the earth. And so even if you try to walk away from each other, I think there's always that possibility and even encouragement to walk back because the roots don't go away.

SIMON: Ann Napolitano - her novel, "Hello, Beautiful" - thank you so much for being with us.

NAPOLITANO: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Review: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Editorial note: I received a copy of Hello Beautiful in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own.

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano is a captivating examination of family, love and forgiveness.

I feel Ann Napolitano is one of the best literary fiction writers out there today. Her novels are so moving, vivid and truly capture the essence of humanity. She writes about extremely tough subject matters in such a delicate but quite impactful way. I’m such a fan of hers, which is one reason why I selected Hello Beautifu l as a must-read book club pick for 2023 .

For instance, if you haven’t read Dear Edward (and the series is now out on Apple TV+), I highly recommend it. I was hesitant at first—reading about the sole survivor of a plane crash seemed really depressing. And it is really sad. But again, it’s handled with care and it’s very moving.

It’s interesting to think that I read Dear Edward exactly three years ago in 2020 as we were dealing with the start of a pandemic. While neither book features a pandemic, both cover broken people, heartbreaking loss and family love. These are the kind of stories that remind me you of what’s important in life.

On the surface, Hello Beautiful is a smaller scale story focusing on a close-knit group of sisters. It’s a homage to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women , yet the story very much stands on its own. There’s a lot of depth and covers a wide range of themes. I see why Oprah selected it for her 100th book club selection. This is one of those novels that is absolutely a perfect fit for book clubs.

What’s the Story About

Hello Beautiful centers around the Padavano family and specifically, on the four sisters: Julia, the go-getter of the family; Sylvie, the bookish dreamer; Cecelia, the free-spirited artist; and Emeline, the compassionate nurturer. The sisters are as close as they can be and always have each other’s backs.

Everything changes when Julia meets William Walters, a shy and broken man with a tragic past. William is immediately taken with Julia’s vibrance and is especially happy to be welcomed into a new family.

However, William’s past eventually resurfaces. And as a result, the sisters’ seemingly unbreakable bond is broken.

Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?

Four Sisters

Little Women is the gold standard for stories about sisters. Sometimes homages to literary classics miss the mark or rely too much on the original source material that they don’t feel authentic.

But in the case of Hello Beautiful , Ann Napolitano pays tribute to the classic while also ensuring the story stands on its own. The sisters within Hello Beautiful are also fans of Little Women and even compare themselves to the sisters of the story, which I thought was a nice touch.

I was so fascinated by the different dynamics of the four sisters, especially that of Julia and Sylvie. Those two characters, along with William, are the main focus of the story. If I have one criticism, it’s that I would have liked a little more from Cecelia and Emeline. While they are in the story, they do take a backseat and I think they could have been developed more.

Everything changes when William comes to the picture. Who would expect such a quiet, unassuming man to have such an impact? But he does.

William’s backstory is quite sad—he was unloved as a child. His parents failed him. They couldn’t get past their own grief of losing William’s older sister. There’s a vivid description of William as a child coughing in a closet so he wouldn’t bother his parents with an illness as he believed it would have reminded them of what they lost.

It’s so sad for a child to have to think like that and feel so alone. I couldn’t get over the cruelty of his parents and it does have such a lasting impact on him. He’s a very complex character. You’ll feel sympathetic but he also makes some choices that are quite cold. And the reason behind is apparent but it doesn’t change the outcome.

Still, William grows quite a bit in the novel and I really liked his character arc overall.

This is one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time. There are certain stories that truly get to you and stay with you for a long time. It’s a beautiful story about family bond and love.

If you’re looking for a well-done literary fiction story, this is the one for you. An ideal book for book clubs as there is a ton to discuss, analyze and even debate about. All the stars for Hello Beautiful .

Check out my book club questions here .

Friday 15th of September 2023

Hello Beautiful should never have been published. The writing is the worst I can ever remember of any book I have ever read. This book would be an excellent example for anyone teaching writing of how not to write. It is all “tell” and no “show” and is so repetitious, I wonder why the author doesn’t realize that saying something once is informative, saying it 90 times is absurd. It is ridiculously predictable and the characters absurdly shallow (although Neapolitan spends a lot of time repetitively “telling” readers just how deep they are. I read this for a book club and I feel cheated of money, time and sanity.

Friday 8th of March 2024

@Jan Hale, I totally agree with you!

Judy Hubbard

Monday 15th of January 2024

I meant for not seeing any depth.

@Ben Morcos, So glad I'm not the only one. I was blaming myself for seeing any depth in it whatsoever.

Monday 23rd of October 2023

@Jan Hale (also @Becky) thank you, exactly, you nailed it. it's shocking to me that anyone didn't find this book unbelievably simple, meant for unsophisticated readers, and just plain bad.

Tuesday 6th of June 2023

I wished the scene where Sylvie kisses William had been more dramatized.

Michele Paynter

Sunday 21st of May 2023

I am absolutely in awe of Ann Napolitano's book, HELLO BEAUTIFUL. I suggested this book recently for my book club choice and I am so glad that I did. Reading this poignant story of a family torn by loss, tragedy, but also of great familial love gave me pause. Between the tears and reflections of my own family - I couldn't put the book down. I'm certain that I will reread this fabulous book as well as recommending it to other book enthusiasts. A tour de force to be sure!

Tuesday 11th of April 2023

I'm confused. I thought this was the worst book I've ever read. It wasn't fluid and left out a lot regarding the parents that raised this group. Both Rose and Williams parents were flat...........why? I had a hard time staying engaged, and felt it fell way short of the raving reviews.

@Becky, I felt the same way! Such unrealistic and downright ignorant details throughout. I may be picky, but I was so disappointed on so many levels. Really the author shows her stupidity without researching enough. Simple details like cashing an old check—it is void after six months! A professor having all kinds of clients in Manhattan—maybe an adjunct economist could but just a weirdly unbelievable detail. To top it off, not one single character was fully developed. She would give a glimpse of a seriously mentally or disfunctional person and really never delve into specifics!

Judy Ransom

@Becky, I just finished the book and felt the same way as you. After all the glowing reviews, I wondered what was wrong with me that I could barely finish it. Sort of makes me sad.

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Book Review

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Title: Hello Beautiful

Author: Ann Napolitano

Publisher: The Dial Press

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Romance

First Publication: 2023

Language:  English

Book Summary: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Meet the Padvano girls. Best friends and sisters, they are thought of as inseparable by everyone in their close-knit Chicago neighbourhood . Julia, the eldest, is the “rocket” of the family – she always has a destination in mind and clear plans for how to get there. Sylvie, the dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book and imagines a life for herself other than the expected path of wife and mother. Cecelia and Emmeline, the twins, are the artist and the caregiver. From childhood, the four sisters complete each other, expecting that their family will always be intact.

When Julia falls in love with William Walters, a history student and college sports star, she’s delighted by the way her plans for adulthood are coming together. A husband, a house, a family. But when darkness from William’s past begins to block the light of his future, it is Sylvie, not Julia, who steps in to help. Suddenly, things shift. Dynamics and relationships, priorities and secrets – everything that was once a given no longer is.

Rich and vivid, heartbreaking and heart-mending,  Hello Beautiful  captures the joy, tragedy, trust, and betrayal to ask: what does it mean to be a family? And once shattered, can it be pieced back together?

Book Review: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Ann Napolitano’s latest novel Hello Beautiful is a poignant and emotionally complex family drama that explores the relationships between four sisters and the ripple effects of trauma across generations. Set between the 1960s and the early 2000s, the novel follows the Padavano sisters – Julia, Sylvie, Cecelia, and Emeline – as they navigate love, loss, motherhood, and their own identities and desires against the backdrop of pivotal historical moments.

The novel opens in 1960 with the brief life and tragic death of William Water’s older sister, Caroline. Her passing casts a permanent shadow over the Waters family that William grapple with over the ensuing decades. William grew up as an only child after his sister Caroline died when he was only a few days old. His parents, particularly his father, became distant after losing Caroline. William mostly kept to himself, finding solace in basketball which he was talented at from a young age. He graduated high school and earned a basketball scholarship to Northwestern.

The protagonists of the novel are the oldest Padavano sisters, Julia and Sylvie. Julia is ambitious, determined, and driven. She plans her life down to every detail and sees the world in straightforward causal relationships, believing she can control outcomes through sheer willpower. Sylvie, in contrast, is a dreamer and a romantic, more interested in losing herself in fiction than in worldly ambition.

The core relationships that structure the narrative are between the sisters themselves, with their mother Rose, and with the men that enter their lives. While the sisters share an unbreakable bond, their disparate personalities also lead to misunderstandings and tensions. Rose is a complicated maternal figure, by turns possessive and distant. The men – Charlie, William, and to a lesser extent Kent – disrupt and reshape the sisterly unit in different ways.

After a brief courtship, Julia marries William, envisioning him as the upstanding husband who will give her the secure middle-class future she desires. Their marriage begins auspiciously, but cracks soon emerge. William struggles with severe depression and a sense of purposelessness, while Julia refuses to see the depths of his unhappiness, pushing him to meet her expectations. William eventually attempts suicide, setting off a chain of events that alters the contours of the sisters’ relationships irrevocably.

The novel alternates between the perspectives of Julia and Sylvie, exposing both women’s hopes, flaws, and deepest wounds. Julia initially comes across as controlling and superficial, obsessed with appearances and social climbing. However, as the narrative gives insight into her psyche, a different picture emerges. Abandoned by her mother, Julia is profoundly insecure about her self-worth and seeks desperately to prove herself through external validation and rigidly constructed order. Her need for control masks a terror of chaos.

Sylvie, who appears flighty and romantic to Julia, harbors her own darkness. She conducts a series of passionless affairs as she waits to meet her one true love. But she also grapples with difficult questions about the nature of fulfillment and belonging. Sylvie’s interiority reveals a thoughtful, sensitive soul ill-suited to the strictures of conventional femininity.

Napolitano excels at portraying the messy complexities of sisterhood – the steadfast loyalty as well as the jealousies, the compatibilities and profound differences. Julia and Sylvie’s perspectives interweave to form a nuanced portrait of a lifelong relationship continually shaped by evolving personalities, emotional needs, and desires.

At times, the novel’s pace suffers due to drawn-out sections of excessive rumination. However, the characters are vividly rendered and emotionally compelling enough to maintain engagement. Napolitano perceptively sketches the social and cultural forces that circumscribe the sisters’ choices, from Julia’s thwarted professional ambitions to the stigma around Cecelia’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

The novel comes full circle with a moving denouement revolving around the sisters’ reconciliation with their mother. Napolitano avoids easy resolutions, instead leaving wounds partially healed with scars still visible. The bittersweet ending fittingly reflects her vision of sisterhood as a complex tapestry woven of memories, trauma, sacrifice, understanding, and love.

Ultimately, Hello Beautiful is a thoughtful exploration of the eternal dance between freedom and belonging. Julia and Sylvie, in very different ways, struggle to balance responsibility to family with individual identity and desire. Napolitano compassionately traces how their conflicted yearnings shape choices with echoing repercussions.

Without downplaying the centrality of sisterly and maternal bonds, the novel also insightfully examines Julia and Sylvie’s relationships with the key men in their lives. Their respective marriages reveal societal gendered expectations around marriage and femininity. William’s descent into suicidal depression evocatively captures the struggle with oppressive male gender norms.

On the whole, Hello Beautiful stands out for its poignant emotional resonance and textured character psychology. The 1970s suburban Chicago setting proves an immersive backdrop to delve into the complex interior lives of its heroines. Napolitano’s quietly perceptive prose illuminates intergenerational trauma’s subtle but indelible fingerprint on identity. An impactful family saga guaranteed to linger in the mind long after the final page.

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Review: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Favorite author alert! Ann Napolitano’s Dear Edward is a gorgeous book that I love, so I was really excited to read Hello Beautiful . With these two books, Napolitano has cemented herself among my favorite authors!

The Summary

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So it’s a relief when his skill on the basketball court earns him a scholarship to college, far away from his childhood home. He soon meets Julia Padavano, a spirited and ambitious young woman who surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her family; she is inseparable from her three younger sisters: Sylvie, the dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book and imagines a future different from the expected path of wife and mother; Cecelia, the family’s artist; and Emeline, who patiently takes care of all of them. Happily, the Padavanos fold Julia’s new boyfriend into their loving, chaotic household.

But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable loyalty 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?

Vibrating with tenderness, Hello Beautiful is a gorgeous, profoundly moving portrait of what’s possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.

I couldn’t believe my luck when I was approved on NetGalley to read Hello Beautiful before it comes out in March. I loved Dear Edward so much ( read my review ), so I was very much looking forward to reading it!

First of all, the relationships in this book are so complicated and messy, but so real and beautiful. The four sisters at the heart of the story all have different relationships with each other, and Napolitano somehow captures each of those unique relationships and how they all fit together.

There’s one moment in this book that was just magical to me, when William and Sylvie are sitting together on a bench. In this ordinary moment, they see each other…like really see each other. It’s honestly one of the most subtly beautiful moments I’ve ever read in a book, and I think it’ll stand out to me forever. It was just so perfect!

Hello Beautiful is named for the girls’ father and how he’d greet them when they entered a room, who ends up not being in the story much, yet is this huge part of his daughters’ lives. I really felt that – how a parent can be not present, yet SO present.

The book takes place over decades. Sometimes, books that make such big time jumps are hard for me, because I feel like I need to know what happened in all those years in between that were skipped, but I didn’t really feel that way with this one. It was just sort of “normal life” continues, and you pick up where you need to.

Overall, I found this book to be pretty amazing. It was like a cozy family novel that I could pick up and fall into for a while (much like Little Women , which is referenced many times in Hello Beautiful ), It’s largely character driven, but definitely has some events that happen to move things along. It’s about legacy, family, true love, grief, mental health, and more. I highly recommend Hello Beautiful and I think it would make a fantastic book club read. 5 full stars!

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Book Review: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

By: Author Luka

Posted on Last updated: March 31, 2024

Categories Book Reviews

This post may contain affiliate links. Read more here .

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.

To read my book club questions for Hello Beautiful , click here .

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 hope you enjoyed my book review for Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano! And as always, I wish you happy reading! ❤️

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Hello Beautiful

by Ann Napolitano

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• Literary Fiction
• Midwest, USA
• 1980s & '90s
• Contemporary
• Parenting & Families
• Adult-YA Crossover Fiction
• Female Friendships
• Strong Women

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Book Review: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Title: Hello Beautiful Author: Ann Napolitano Publisher: The Dial Press Publication date: March 14, 2023 Length: 416 pages Genre: Contemporary fiction Source: Purchased

An emotionally layered and engrossing story of a family that asks: Can love make a broken person whole? William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So it’s a relief when his skill on the basketball court earns him a scholarship to college, far away from his childhood home. He soon meets Julia Padavano, a spirited and ambitious young woman who surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her family; she is inseparable from her three younger sisters: Sylvie, the dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book and imagines a future different from the expected path of wife and mother; Cecelia, the family’s artist; and Emeline, who patiently takes care of all of them. Happily, the Padavanos fold Julia’s new boyfriend into their loving, chaotic household. But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable loyalty 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? Vibrating with tenderness, Hello Beautiful is a gorgeous, profoundly moving portrait of what’s possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.

Hello Beautiful is a hard book to describe, and in some ways, just as hard to commit to reading — but as I discovered, sticking with it pays off in the end.

The events of Hello Beautiful swirl around William Waters, whom we follow from boyhood through middle age. His life is marked for tragedy from the start — his older sister dies when he’s less than one week old, permanently scarring his parents and leaving him bereft of their love and attention. William grows up lonely, saved only by the relief and belonging he finds on the basketball court.

In college, he meets Julia Padavano, oldest of four sisters in a tight-knit family. Julie is determined to achieve her life plans, which include marrying a successful man and devoting herself to becoming a wife and mother. William has so little belief in himself that he molds himself to whomever he’s with; Julia falls for William and his readiness to be who she needs him to be. His only passion is basketball, but Julia believes he’d make a great college professor, so he follows the path she sets for him — getting married, entering graduate school, starting a family.

Things go disastrously wrong after the birth of their daughter, and a permanent rift severs the Padavano family. Without entering spoiler territory, I’ll just say that William is at the center of the storm, but the relationships between all members of the extended family end up shattered or reconfigured.

There’s a great deal of sorrow and pain in Hello Beautiful , but real loveliness as well. The Padavano sisters have such closeness and are so interconnected that the changes within the family feel tragic, even though some pieces of the relationships survive and end up even stronger.

I often feel overwhelmed by books that introduce a large family all at once, as it can be daunting to tell the characters apart or remember which personality goes with which person. Not so here — each of the four sisters is distinct and memorable, and they all shine in their own ways. The sisters compare themselves to the March sisters of Little Women (even declaring “I’m Beth today” on days when they’re not feeling well), and by the end, it’s fairly clear which Padavano matches which March girl. I’ve seen some reviewers refer to Hello Beautiful as a Little Women retelling, which I’d disagree with. Yes, there are a few parallels which the sisters themselves call out, but this is a very different book as a whole.

Hello Beautiful is big and sprawling, and for the first third or so, takes a while to truly get going and develop a focus. Much of the story feels anecdotal, and the narrative approach — with alternating chapters dedicated to William, Julia, Sylvie, and other characters — adds to the sense of scattered storytelling. However, when catastrophe strikes midway through, the plot itself sharpens, and the emotional impact truly kicks in.

I took issue with some of the characters’ perspectives on certain events, and disagreed with the commonly held interpretation of what had happened (being intentionally vague… again, no spoilers from me!) — and yet, I can appreciate that each character has their own worldview that shapes their version of events and gives them what they need to carry on and move forward.

The book’s emphasis on family, love, and friendship is quite lovely, and this is what leaves a lasting impression. There’s so much depth to the relationships depicted in Hello Beautiful , as well as the recognition that people’s impact on others can be vast and unseen, and that we can never truly know just how important someone is to so many others.

I’ll be thinking about Hello Beautiful for quite a while to come, and just wish I had others to discuss it with! This would make a great book club selection — there’s so much food for thought.

Hello Beautiful is highly recommended. Don’t miss it!

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3 thoughts on “ book review: hello beautiful by ann napolitano ”.

I’m so glad you reviewed this, I’ve been very curious about it. It sounds wonderfully epic and complex!

It is! It’s really worth checking out.

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Monday, March 20, 2023

Book review of "hello beautiful" by ann napolitano.

Interested in stories about sisters and found families, with a dose of coming of age, oh and also how about some romance?! Looking for your next four or five star read? Keep reading this post to check out my review of Oprah Book Club's 100th book pick, "Hello Beautiful" by Ann Napolitano.

by Ann Napolitano

goodreads // amazon // library

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him—so 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: Sylvie, the family’s dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book; Cecelia is a free-spirited artist; and Emeline patiently takes care of them all. With the Padavanos, William experiences a newfound contentment; every moment in their house is filled with loving chaos.   But then 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?   An exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott’s timeless classic, Little Women , Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it. ( from amazon.com)   

Book Review and Discussion of "Hello Beautiful" by Ann Napolitano

Ann Napolitano books are always my favorite  Even though I actually read her last novel, "Dear Edward" three years ago, I feel like I read it just last month. The memories from the book and the emotions in it are still easy for me to connect with, which as a reader with a long list of books read, is an especially difficult accomplishment for an author! If you haven't read "Dear Edward" yet - do it because it is so, so good. I loved "Hello Beautiful" in a similar way and I'm sure I'll be thinking about this book for a while, wondering about the characters, and reflecting on all of the quotes I saved while reading. I can not wait to see what Napolitano writes next; she is absolutely one of my favorites!

Check out some of my favorite quotes from "Dear Edward" by the author of "Hello Beautiful", Ann Napolitano.

"Hello Beautiful" strikes so many different emotions  I really feel like this novel has something for everyone. In part because it covers so many different characters and also stages of life. I really rooted for these characters and also felt incredibly sad with them. It was an emotional rollercoaster in the way only a really good book can be!

Characters to love and hate I can't wait for other readers to grab this book to see which characters they love and connect with the most. A common struggle for readers is finding a hateable character and then the novel is ruined for them by that character. I think my favorite character in "Hello Beautiful" was Alice. And my least favorite was definitely Julia, and I do not think I will be alone there. Reading that character's storyline will be an understandable challenge for some readers because a huge chunk of the book was from her perspective. Her story ultimately didn't bother me as a reader but it might bother other people.

Such a good book club choice  Because this book hits so many different emotions and also raises so many interesting questions it would be an excellent book club pick. For example, most of the characters in this book take substantial risks in their lives and most of those risks are worth the reward, but others are less so. So many interesting conversations could be generated by looking at those risks, deciding if they were worth taking, and how they might play out off of the page. Any book with a hatable main character is also sure to generate lots of conversations and I felt like this book has that covered too.

Things I Struggled With

Repetitive A common criticism I saw checking out the Goodreads reviews, and one that I also agree with is that "Hello Beautiful" becomes repetitive. I think repetitive themes in novels are fine, I don't need a ton of action and prefer character-driven plots which can tend to show the same themes, but in actual character experiences it wears on me. Pretty much the entire book, the main characters are repeating the same emotional struggles just in a new place. Their thoughts about those problems and how they choose to solve them, or not solve them, don't change over the course of most of the novel and after 400 pages, it did become a bit frustrating. 

Frustrating characters If you are someone who gets frustrated with character choices and that puts you off when reading a book, this one might not be for you. For example, I really struggled with Julia's character because she just refused to grow emotionally, at least not in the way I would hope. By the end of the book, I was even more frustrated that she didn't understand why her poor choices would have negatively affected her daughter's ability to form relationships - definitely a "throw the book across the room" frustration moment for me. 

Related - There were so many beautiful quotes in "Hello Beautiful". Click the image below to see which quotes from "Hello Beautiful" by Ana Napolitano made my list!

2 comments:

This book drove me crazy. I don’t understand where the love of these characters comes from. The author doesn’t really create character arcs as much as she preaches to the reader about how we should feel about them. She doesn’t develop characters through their speech or actions, as much as she tells you what to think about them, and what she is attempting to create with them. Go back and search for character development, and you just find paragraph after paragraph of the author telling you what everything means. Her narrator goes on and on about meaning without ever letting the characters draw you into the meaning through their thoughts and speech. How close we Go back and search for character development, and you just find paragraph after paragraph of the author telling you what everything means. Her narrator goes on and on about meaning without ever letting the characters draw you into the meaning through their thoughts and speech. The omniscient narrator is much more of a character than anyone in the book.

OMG I absolutely agree with this! I just finished the book and so went and looked up the reviews and was shocked that no one has critiqued the author for the reasons you mentioned . It’s a good story with lots of tears at the end. It’s an entertaining and thoughtful look at family dysfunction and connections BUT I have to say I thought the writing was distractingly mediocre! So much self-help language that is totally anachronistic and modern (“wrap my head around”, finding my truth”) for a book mostly set in the 80s. And the author just tells us and TELLS us how the characters feel and are evolving instead of letting their behavior or dialogue speak for itself. And this is sort of the hallmark of mediocre writing IMO. It felt like a worse written version of Celeste Ng or Elizabeth Strout…

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, hello beautiful.

The New York Times bestselling author of DEAR EDWARD returns with HELLO BEAUTIFUL. This triumphant, emotionally resonant story is about the transformative power of love, and the beauty and growth that come with meeting others as we are while accepting them the same way.

The Padavano girls --- Julia, Sylvie, and twins Cecelia and Emeline --- have long considered themselves Italian American versions of Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. They are woven into the fabric of each other’s lives, and they are so close that they have been able to identify, champion and celebrate the strongest traits of one another and use them to uplift the entire group. So when eldest sister Julia --- the spitting image of her driven, focused and critical mother, Rose --- finds a quiet, methodical and handsome man to settle down with in college, the girls are thrilled. As the first one of them to fall in love and add to their family unit, Julia gives the others hope in the promise that all will work out as they have always dreamed. Not only has she softened around the edges, she seems to have broken the curse of her own mother’s marriage to a pleasant and loving, but feckless and irresponsible man.

"HELLO BEAUTIFUL is a sweeping, perceptive and beautifully rendered family saga that could only be achieved by an author at the height of her literary powers.... Book clubs will no doubt find much to reflect on, discuss and deepen their connections with in this generous, healing novel."

Julia’s romance may not be the stuff of classics, but in William Waters she has found her ideal complement. A quiet but smart man with no serious ambitions (though he could do anything if he sets his mind to it), William is the perfect outlet for Julia’s need for control and ability to problem-solve. Within moments of meeting him, she has their wedding, careers, promotions and old age planned and sorted for them. Accommodating, polite William, who still cannot believe his luck in catching the eye of a gorgeous, brilliant girl, is more than happy to follow her lead. Until his own past rears its ugly head.

As a child, William lived for exactly six days as a younger brother until his three-year-old sister, Caroline, died suddenly in her crib. With his birth seeming to announce the painful end to his parents’ joy, William is left neglected and alone. His mother and father fed, clothed and supported him, but he never knew love or affection as a child --- at least not until he found basketball. Taking comfort in his ability to practice alone, William soon discovered a real talent and joined his school’s team, finding camaraderie and community in the sport but also a purpose. This necessary but unfulfilling coping mechanism guided him through college applications and acceptances. When he shook his father’s hand before leaving for college, he knew he would never see his dysfunctional folks again. Fortunately, he found a new family in Julia and her boisterous, loving home full of whimsical, serious and artistic girls, not to mention her parents, who quickly took him in as one of their own.

For the first quarter of HELLO BEAUTIFUL, Julia and William’s romance takes center stage. All seems perfect, almost alarmingly so. Were this novel written by a less accomplished author, their story alone might be enough. But this is an Ann Napolitano production, and therefore the narrative is so much richer and more complex. When Cecelia announces that she is pregnant at 17 and Julia quickly forces William to impregnate her as well, the births of their daughters do the same thing that William’s birth did for his family: they cause the Padavanos to implode. And when tragedy strikes them in a devastating, shocking blow, the entire clan unravels. Each is left to contemplate what role they really play in the family…and who they are alone, without the others to define them.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL is a sweeping, perceptive and beautifully rendered family saga that could only be achieved by an author at the height of her literary powers. At first glance an homage to LITTLE WOMEN, the book breathes new life into the classic by writing the sisters as individual, separate women: flawed, beautiful, demanding, loving and full of life. Each is wonderfully described, with Napolitano first employing stereotypes --- the bossy one, the bookish one, the artsy one, the loving one --- and then building strong, finely crafted and expertly nuanced personalities on these foundations.

But more than creating these vivid, relatable characters, Napolitano takes great care --- never wasting or misusing a word --- to examine their unique positions within the family and their own interpersonal dynamics. She often lays out a scene from one perspective and then goes back only a few hours or so from the point of view of another to analyze all of the emotions, pulls and draws, and painful decisions that go into every encounter: marriage, childbirth, sibling arguments, love, betrayal and coming of age. As the girls --- and William, my favorite character in perhaps all of Napolitano’s works --- transform and grow, Napolitano is constantly delivering uplifting, transcendent observations on life, love and what makes every encounter meaningful. The result is so beautiful that it is almost impossible to describe, an instant classic that will find a home with any reader.

An immersive work of fiction that is woven through with transformative, powerful grief, HELLO BEAUTIFUL is a soaring portrait of love. Perfect for readers of ASK AGAIN, YES, THE DEARLY BELOVED and THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD, it is sure to make many of this year’s “Best Of” lists. Book clubs will no doubt find much to reflect on, discuss and deepen their connections with in this generous, healing novel.

Reviewed by Rebecca Munro on March 17, 2023

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

• Publication Date: March 14, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: The Dial Press
• ISBN-10: 0593243730
• ISBN-13: 9780593243732

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Hello Beautiful (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel Hardcover – March 14, 2023

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• Print length 400 pages
• Language English
• Publisher The Dial Press
• Publication date March 14, 2023
• Dimensions 6.47 x 1.3 x 9.53 inches
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Dial Press (March 14, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593243730
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593243732
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.42 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.47 x 1.3 x 9.53 inches
• #20 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
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• #65 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Ann napolitano.

Ann Napolitano's new novel, Hello Beautiful, will be published on March 14th, 2023 by Dial Press in the US and on July 13th by Viking Penguin in the UK. Her novel, Dear Edward, was an instant New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna selection, and is now an Apple TV+ series starring Connie Britton. She is the author of the novels A Good Hard Look and Within Arm’s Reach. She was the Associate Editor of One Story literary magazine for seven years, and received an MFA from New York University. She has taught fiction writing for Brooklyn College's MFA program, New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies and for Gotham Writers' Workshop.

Dear Edward was published by Dial Press in the United States, and by Viking Penguin in the United Kingdom. It was chosen as one of the best novels of 2020 by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Amazon, Real Simple, Fast Company, Parade, Woman's World and more. The novel currently has twenty-six international publishers. For more information about Ann or her books, please visit www.annnapolitano.com.

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Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

• Publication Date: March 14, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: The Dial Press
• ISBN-10: 0593243730
• ISBN-13: 9780593243732
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Hello Beautiful

55 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-13

Chapters 14-19

Chapters 20-32

Chapters 33-39

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

Introduction

Hello Beautiful is American author Ann Napolitano’s fourth novel. Hello Beautiful was an instant New York Times bestseller and was selected as an Oprah’s Book Club Pick. It has been praised by critics and readers for its homage to Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women . This guide uses the 2023 Dial Press edition.

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Content Warning: The guide and novel contain discussions of mental illness and death by suicide.

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The novel opens with the birth of William Waters in 1960 and chronicles his lonely childhood. Only days after his birth, his sister dies, leaving his parents bereft and emotionally withdrawn. Because of this, William is emotionally neglected and begins to suffer from depression. He finds solace through basketball , which allows him to finally feel connected to other people without having to share his emotions. After graduation, he attends Northwestern University on a sports scholarship, and there he meets the vibrant and ambitious Julia Padavano , who quickly makes him her boyfriend.

With Julia come her three sisters: the bookish Sylvie, artistic Cecelia, and nurturing Emeline. Her parents, Charlie and Rose, are opposites in many ways. William’s life quickly becomes intertwined with the Padavanos, and when he and Julia are engaged, Rose tells him to start calling her mom.

William’s life becomes complicated when he shatters his knee during a basketball game. Because a previous injury never fully healed correctly, he requires multiple surgeries and is no longer able to play basketball. This causes William to sink into another depression, during which he becomes uncertain of his identity or purpose. Without an internal sense of self, William looks to Julia for guidance, and she happily provides it: She decides William should become a history professor, and he accepts this path, enrolling in Northwestern’s graduate history program.

Julia’s straightforward plans for their lives are derailed when Cecelia, who is still in high school, becomes pregnant and decides to raise the child as a single mother. Rose, a faithful Catholic, is appalled at her daughter’s choice and kicks her out of their home. Trying to get their family back together again, Julia decides to get pregnant, even though William expresses uncertainty about wanting a child. Things fall apart in quick succession: Cecelia has her baby, Izzy, and moments after Charlie visits her in the hospital, he dies; Rose pushes Sylvie, her remaining daughter, out of the house and announces that she is moving to Florida; and Julia and William’s marriage begins to deteriorate once she has the baby, Alice, and no longer is supervising his day-to-day life.

Effectively homeless, Sylvie begins sleeping at William and Julia’s place. Julia is worried about William and asks Sylvie to read a manuscript William has been secretly writing. Sylvie discovers that, while it is not a cohesive book, it is a deeply personal project in which she is able to see William’s uncertainty about his identity and purpose. Sylvie begins to see her brother-in-law’s struggles and considers him in a new light.

William drifts further into his depression. One day, he accidentally falls asleep on a bench and misses his classes, and feeling as though his life is a sham anyway, he stops attending classes altogether. For a week, he lies to Julia and keeps up the guise of his routine, but when she discovers the truth, he tells her that he will only hurt her and Alice if he stays with them. He leaves and wanders the streets of Chicago for a long time and then attempts to drown himself in Lake Michigan.

Julia tells Sylvie that William has left, and Sylvie is concerned, knowing William’s troubled state. With William’s friends, Sylvie searches all night for him and finally finds him the next day, when she sees people pulling a man out of Lake Michigan. She claims to be William’s wife so she can ride with him in the ambulance. All throughout his hospitalization and recovery, Sylvie stays by William’s side and gradually begins to fall in love with him. At first, William insists that he will simply hurt her too, but Sylvie continues to visit, and the two fall deeply in love with one another.

Fearful that William’s mental health will affect their daughter, Julia is relieved when he agrees to a divorce and relinquishment of his parental rights. She moves to New York City for a job and begins building her own life apart from her family, raising Alice as a single mother. When she learns about William and Sylvie’s relationship, she is deeply wounded and breaks ties with her sister, limiting the rest of the family’s access to her as well. As Alice grows older, she knows very little about her family, and Julia tells her that her father is dead.

For years, the rest of the Padavanos stay involved in one another’s lives in Chicago; Cecelia and Emeline live in twin duplexes, and they co-parent Izzy. With the help of his friends, William realizes he can continue to have a career in basketball, and he gets a job as a physical therapist with the Chicago Bulls. Julia is happy in New York City but realizes she misses being in her sisters’ lives. Alice grows into a cautious teen, afraid to upset her mother by asking questions about her family.

Decades later, Sylvie is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, and William calls Julia to tell her the news. Although Julia initially refuses to act, her deep connection with Sylvie pulls her back to Chicago, and the sisters reconcile before Sylvie’s death. Their reconciliation also prompts Julia to finally tell her daughter the truth about William and the Padavanos. The novel closes with Alice traveling to Chicago to meet the family she’s never known and William opening his heart to her, allowing for a final reconciliation the day after Sylvie’s death.

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Ann Napolitano gives a preview of her next book, 'Hello Beautiful'

Ann Napolitano’s last novel, “Dear Edward,” was chosen as a Read With Jenna pick in 2020. Jenna told TODAY she chose the tear-jerker because “it is a book about love and loss and finding your way after the unthinkable.” The novel follows the 12-year-old sole survivor of an airplane crash, which kills his entire immediate family.

Napolitano said her next book, “Hello Beautiful,” out in 2023, shares some thematic DNA with “Dear Edward.” This time, she’s interested in William Waters, a college basketball player with a tragic past who finds warmth and acceptance in the family he marries into.

“There are emotional notes of ‘Dear Edward’ in this novel: grief, kindness, the resiliency of the human spirit, our deep human need for connection. In ‘Dear Edward,’ a young Edward stepped out of a physical wreckage, and in ‘Hello Beautiful,’ a young William steps out of an emotional one. It’s ultimately a story about the beauty and the cost of love,” Napolitano told TODAY.

Napolitano began writing “Hello Beautiful” at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. While not about the pandemic, Napolitano said the book is a response to it nevertheless.

“Part of the reason I write is to make sense of myself and the world, and that felt necessary: we were housebound because of COVID, I was trying to make my two sons feel safe even though I didn’t, and my father had just died. I was grateful to find some comfort, and even glimmers of hope, inside the fictional world that became ‘Hello Beautiful,’ “she said.

William grows up in a house “silenced by tragedy.” Julia Padavano, the woman he’ll go on to marry, is from a raucous household. The oldest of four girls, Julia and her sisters are inseparable, and accept him into the fold.

“I began to feel, while writing, that I could heal both myself and William if I kept those vibrant sisters — Julia, Sylvie, Cecelia and Emeline — in my sightline,” she said.

See an exclusive cover reveal below.

Upon seeing the cover, Napolitano felt it was in conversation with the novel. “ One of the sisters in the novel paints murals of women’s faces, so this cover felt perfect and meaningful to the story of Hello Beautiful,” she said.

If this sounds slightly “Little Women-esque” to you, then that’s the point. The book is a subtle, modern-day homage to “Little Women.”

“When the four Padavano sisters stepped into the story — each of them strong-willed and loving but so different from one another — I realized they were the heartbeat that would shape the rest of the novel. They became my homage to the fictional sisters I loved so much growing up: the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women,” she said.

"Hello Beautiful," by Ann Napolitano

"Hello Beautiful"

But it’s also an ode to Napolitano’s own life. Napolitano also lost her father in 2020. Missing him, she decided to imbue his best qualities into Charlie, the girls’ father.

“He always greets his four daughters with the words hello beautiful, and the warmth and sincerity of this greeting pulls each girl’s specific, inner beauty to the surface. I came to appreciate, along with the characters in the book, the remarkable power of Charlie’s love and attention,” she said.

The title is an homage to Charlie, too. He always greets his daughters with the words, "Hello beautiful." As Napolitano wrote in a letter to the reader, "The warmth and sincerity of this greeting pulls each girl’s specific, inner beauty to the surface."

As for what happens in the book? The official description teases the action: "Darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable loyalty 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?"

Find out when "Hello Beautiful" comes out on March 13, 2023.

Elena Nicolaou is a senior entertainment editor at Today.com, where she covers the latest in TV, pop culture, movies and all things streaming. Previously, she covered culture at Refinery29 and Oprah Daily. Her superpower is matching people up with the perfect book, which she does on her podcast, Blind Date With a Book.

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