The Emilys - A Novel — Content Guide for Parents
Found in this book
- ReligionBrief
- Race & cultureSupporting
- ClimateCentral
- Gender rolesSupportingChallenges traditional roles
- Gender & orientationSupporting
Not found
- Violence
- Scary content
- Sexual content
Couldn't confirm
- Profanity
- Profanity: No source describes the book's language or lists swear words.
Content themes
Factual summary of themes present in this book. No opinion — just the facts.
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Religion
PRESENTContains references to prayer and church attendance. A minister character plays a supporting role in two chapters.
About this book
“Gorgeous and compelling.”—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love
“And if we weren’t afraid of the darkness? What world would we make then?”
Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she’s frustrated, bored, and above all, lonely when she runs into Demeter, a childhood friend with whom she shared one transformative summer. Demeter is as beautiful and charismatic as Eve remembers, but she’s also distraught. Demeter’s daughter, like a growing number of others, young and old, cannot go outside during the day. No one knows why, and doctors are skeptical that these people—soon dubbed Emilys, after a famously reclusive local poet—are telling the truth. But Eve believes her friend, whose company revives her and gives her purpose. She will help Demeter—if she can just figure out how.
Eve’s search for answers brings her into the fold of an unlikely band of detectives—the local librarian and the town’s most prolific writer of letters to the editor, who both loved the same woman and now hate each other; an actor hoping to make amends for past mistakes; a hermit botanist whose seed collection might hold a clue if she’d only open her door. They meet in playdates and potlucks, the Elks Lodge and the food co-op, the botanical garden and the riverbank, venturing deep into the town’s past and finding their way towards a future wilder and more wondrous than they had ever expected. But for Eve, this future will require a price: She is keeping secrets from her husband, fighting with Demeter, distracted from her children. What is she willing to risk to find a cure?
The Emilys is a capacious, profound book about how love of all kinds—love between friends, between mothers and kids, between strangers and neighbors, love for the earth—opens up new possibilities. It asks: How will we learn to live in an altered world? How will we keep each other safe? And when the darkness comes, how will we find joy?
Frequently asked questions
Is The Emilys - A Novel appropriate for a 7-year-old?
The narrator briefly muses about how transactional God seems, and the book's Jewish characters are described mainly in terms of identity rather than worship. A Jewish Book Council review says Jewish identity is a point of conflict and connection for Eve, and that her mother carries inherited Holocaust trauma that strains their relationship.
Does The Emilys - A Novel have violence?
Not found in the sources we checked.
Does The Emilys - A Novel have scary content?
Not found in the sources we checked.
Does The Emilys - A Novel have religion?
Found (Brief): The narrator briefly muses about how transactional God seems, and the book's Jewish characters are described mainly in terms of identity rather than worship.
Does The Emilys - A Novel have race & culture?
Found (Supporting): A Jewish Book Council review says Jewish identity is a point of conflict and connection for Eve, and that her mother carries inherited Holocaust trauma that strains their relationship.
Does The Emilys - A Novel have profanity?
Couldn't confirm: No source describes the book's language or lists swear words.
Does The Emilys - A Novel have climate?
Found (Central): Reviewers describe the book as a climate-crisis mystery in which the search for a possibly extinct wildflower cure drives the plot.
Does The Emilys - A Novel have sexual content?
Not found in the sources we checked.
Does The Emilys - A Novel have gender roles?
Found (Supporting, Challenges traditional roles): Reviews say the story deals with the isolation of motherhood, with Eve alone with the children while her husband works in the city and she has put aside her own writing ambitions.
Does The Emilys - A Novel have gender & orientation?
Found (Supporting): One of the main secondary characters, the librarian Ruth, is described as gay and has her own chapters, and she and another character once loved the same woman.
