From the beloved author of The Divorcées comes a novel set in the 1970s during an island wedding, where the bride has recently left a sinister cult that might still be trailing her

On a remote island off the coast of Virginia, family and friends gather to celebrate the wedding of Shay O’Connor and Andrew Pruitt. From the moment the guests arrive, all they can whisper about is the bride, who recently left the headline-making cult Synanon. Why would someone like Shay, an Ivy League graduate with a wealthy, doting fiancée, join Synanon? And has she really escaped their grasp?

Told from the interwoven perspectives of Shay’s brother William, her longtime friend Joel, and Shay herself, Tenderness is a slow-burn mystery that excavates dark family histories and romantic regrets. As the wedding day approaches, Joel and William pull at the loose threads of Shay’s story, and it becomes clear there is an even greater threat on the island than the secrets each character is keeping from one another.

Set in the tinderbox of the 1970s, Tenderness is a lit match, bringing hidden truths to light and asking if we can ever see ourselves or the people we love for who they truly are.

I received an advance copy of this book courtesy of the publisher. All thoughts are my own.

I feel like I have not been picking great books lately, and this one is another case of me expecting something completely different from what I actually got. I went in hoping for a juicy mystery with some cult creepiness and maybe a few genuine chills. Instead, I was bored and disconnected most of the time.

The setup takes place on a remote island off Virginia, where family and friends gather for the wedding of Shay and her fiance Andrew. Everyone at the wedding is quietly buzzing about the fact that Shay recently left a well known, headline making cult, and nobody can quite figure out why someone with her background, an Ivy League degree, a wealthy fiance, all the trappings of an easy life, would have joined in the first place. The story is told from three different perspectives, Shay, her brother William, and her longtime friend Joel, and as the wedding approaches, William and Joel start pulling at the threads of what actually happened to Shay while she was gone.

The writing itself is genuinely good, and I appreciated getting multiple perspectives woven together. The problem is that once I finished, I honestly struggled to figure out what the book was actually trying to say. It felt like all the pieces were there for something bigger, but they never quite added up to a cohesive point.

William was the only character I really connected with, and honestly his sections were the most interesting part of the whole book. This is a guy who comes home to the apartment he shared with his aunt, discovers she’s died, and then still goes to the wedding and tells everyone she simply chose not to come rather than admit she’s dead. That is such a specific, unsettling choice, and I wanted so much more time inside his head.

As for the cult storyline, which honestly I thought would have been the engine of this whole book, it just sort of sits there. It had every opportunity to bring real tension and intrigue to the plot, and instead it stayed frustratingly surface level. I kept waiting for it to become the central mystery it was clearly set up to be, and it never really did.

Pacing wise, this book moves slowly, and not in a way that builds tension. It’s more that things unfold at a steady drip without ever picking up real momentum. By the end, I felt like I had missed the point of the whole story, and not in an intentionally ambiguous, thought provoking way.

I listened to this one, and the narration team of Katharine Chin, Peter Cross, and Evan Sibley did a great job. All three of them fully inhabited their characters. Even with strong narration, though, my mind kept drifting while I listened, which tells you a lot about how much the story itself was holding my attention.

Overall, this one just did not click for me. If you’re drawn to slow burn family dramas with multiple perspectives and don’t need the cult angle to be the main event, this could still work for you. For me, it just did not come together in a way that could hold my interest.