Traffic stops dead halfway across the Coronado Bridge. Rain hammers the minivan, the young driver is breathing into a paper bag, and the only edible thing anyone has found is a bag of hemp-laced dog biscuits meant to calm an elderly Pomeranian on flights. So three adults eat them, in solidarity. They are earthy, gluey and faintly medicinal, and they do nothing for anyone’s nerves. One of the three is the narrator’s ex-husband, whom she has not seen in a decade. Penelope in Retrograde by Brooke Abrams puts its heroine in that van before she has even reached the family she has been avoiding, and the absurdity is the point: going home has already started to go wrong, and she has not yet crossed the water.
A Holiday Kept Like a Scoreboard
Penny Banks writes romance novels under a name her parents have never been told. She is coming back to their house on the island for the first time in ten years because she needs her father’s money for a bookstore, and she intends to ask for it before pie.
The bookstore matters more than a plot device usually does. Penny’s argument for it, rehearsed in the kitchen with the man pretending to be her boyfriend, is that romance is the most widely read genre and the least respected, and that a shop can sell belonging as well as paperbacks. Penelope in Retrograde by Brooke Abrams is quietly on her side, and some of its sharpest comedy comes from a family that has never asked to read a single one of her books.
The novel’s quiet ambition is to show why one day on the calendar can carry so much. Abrams cuts away from the present weekend to five earlier Novembers, and every November went wrong somewhere new. The most affecting of them finds Penny in her early twenties, newly engaged and working as an obituary writer for a small paper, drafting a notice on the drive home for a woman who died alone and whose estranged children wanted nothing said. That chapter quietly states the stakes of the whole book without announcing them. Back in the present, the Thanksgiving Day kitchen is a war of measurements, with her mother and grandmother fighting over a cup of sugar for the cornbread. The best scene in Penelope in Retrograde by Brooke Abrams follows: her father, a man who has spent the book being formal and disappointed, rolls out the crust for the family lemon meringue pie himself, because he baked at a guesthouse to pay his way through school. Nobody makes a speech. Flour does the work.
The Woman Across the Street
The grief in this novel belongs to someone who is never on stage in the present. Fiona Mackenzie, the ex-husband’s mother, was a rock star with a garden of crystals and a calendar ruled by the moon, and for a lonely teenager across the street she was the adult who never asked her to be anyone else. She died the summer before the story opens. Penny learns it in the van.
Abrams handles this thread with more restraint than the rest of the book. A smoky quartz pendant that Fiona once gave Penny becomes a small talisman, touched in passing and never explained twice. The astrology that frames the title is played for laughs among Penny’s friends, but through Fiona it becomes a language for endings and beginnings, and the new moon that falls during the weekend is used as a genuine turning point. A ring box glimpsed in the ex-husband’s bag on the bridge keeps the tension going for chapters, and its explanation is one of the few late turns that earns its sentiment.
Penelope in Retrograde and the Sister Who Stayed
If Fiona is the book’s heart, Phoebe is its conscience. Penny’s twin is the daughter who did everything right, and the early chapters let Penny cast her as the golden child. Then Phoebe pushes back. She has spent a decade at those dinners alone, absorbing her parents’ worry and their blame for the sister who would not come home, and she has an announcement of her own that Penny keeps trampling without noticing. When Phoebe tells her, in effect, that she turns every family gathering into a solo performance with everyone else as supporting cast, it is the moment Penelope in Retrograde by Brooke Abrams becomes a better book than its premise.
The scene also exposes the novel’s chief weakness, since it is Phoebe who points out that everything is a joke to Penny. That is true of the prose as well. The wisecracks arrive line after line, and too many tender beats are cut short by a reference to a nineties film or a celebrity. The comedy is often good. It is rarely silent.
Where the Comedy Gets in the Way
Other faults in Penelope in Retrograde by Brooke Abrams follow from the same appetite for noise. The ex-husband’s girlfriend, who arrives young, effusive and dressed exactly like Penny, is written as a running gag rather than a person, which makes the second-chance thread feel staged. The fake relationship with her father’s new hire is charming in single scenes but never quite becomes the romance the cover promises; the family story is plainly what interests the author more. And the resolution arrives as if by courier: problems that drove the plot for most of the book are settled within a couple of chapters, one of them by a stroke of luck that removes the need for the conversation the book had been building towards. Readers should also know that the weekend involves grief, illness, estrangement, a good deal of alcohol and cannabis, and frank talk throughout, though the romance itself stays behind a closed door.
The Writer Behind Penelope in Retrograde
This was Brooke Abrams’s first novel, and its acknowledgments read like a map of how a debut gets made. She came up through Pitch Wars, the volunteer mentoring programme for unagented writers, first as a mentee and later as a mentor herself. Her critique partner was the romance novelist Falon Ballard, who also supplied an early endorsement, and attentive readers will notice that Phoebe’s fiancée carries the same first name.
Abrams also thanks her own mother and sister for providing material for the Banks family, which goes some way to explaining why the sister in Penelope in Retrograde by Brooke Abrams feels so much more fully imagined than the men.
What It Leaves Behind
What lingers is not the bridge or the banter but a father and daughter standing over a pie dish, not quite apologising. Readers who enjoyed the family-first comedy of Funny Story by Emily Henry will find a similar mix of romance and repair here, while Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You offers the same crowded-house chaos with more bite. Those who want the holiday table seen with less laughter and more ache should go next to Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, whose family keeps trying, and failing, to finish one meal together.
Penelope in Retrograde by Brooke Abrams is not a subtle novel, but it is a kind one. Some people need ten years to come back for the holidays. It is gentle with them, and honest about who kept the chairs warm while they were gone.