Willow Run

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Kristine Kennedy

There is a moment early in Willow Run when Shannon, returning from a dreamy family sailing vacation in the Virgin Islands, types “how to” into her laptop search bar and watches the algorithm fill in its assumptions: How to end a marriage but keep a friendship. How to mediate the end of a marriage. How to leave a marriage without anyone getting hurt. She closes the tab. She has an employee to fire and a teenager to manage and a husband who seems just slightly, inexplicably elsewhere. There has to be an explanation.

Kelly Sokol’s novel is a beautifully observed portrait of a woman whose careful, well-appointed life begins to come apart at the seams she didn’t know were there. Set in the sun-drenched suburb of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, the story moves between Shannon’s present-tense reckoning and the three-years-earlier chapters told from her husband Scott’s point of view, a structural choice that works like a slow reveal: we understand what Shannon is about to discover long before she does, and the effect is quietly devastating.

Sokol writes the texture of upper-middle-class marriage with remarkable precision. The buttermilk fried chicken made from scratch, the wine poured before the hard conversation, the way Shannon reaches for Scott’s hand at dinner and he gently slips his away. These are scenes of surface warmth concealing something colder underneath, and Sokol captures them without a trace of condescension. Shannon is no fool; she is simply someone who trusted the version of her life she had built, and who must now build another.

What elevates the novel beyond domestic drama is the compassion Sokol extends to every character, including Scott. His chapters are rendered with aching interiority, the portrait of a man loving someone he has no sanctioned language for loving. Both Shannon and Scott are sympathetic, and both are caught in a story that was always larger than either of them understood.

Willow Run is a confident, emotionally generous work of fiction. Sokol is a writer of quiet power, and this novel announces her squarely.