This beautifully written story of 2 sisters coming of age during the 80's transported me back to a time and place that felt so familiar. Told in the voice of the older sister, age 13, her narrative perfectly captures the insecurity, emotional turmoil and short-sighted thinking of that age. It explores the love/hate relationship between the 2 sisters and their incredibly strong bond of love. It felt like home and yet made me feel the discomfort of being that age again. Would highly recommend.

From the first chapter to the last, I couldn't put this book down and ended up finishing it in a day. I really enjoyed this story and it gave nostalgic vibes to the 80s/90s and also being a kid and trying to understand yourself and your sibling as you both grow and change.

Add in a missing child and this character driven book, is a story that will stay with me.

Thank you so much to @Netgalley & @Dutton Books for the advanced reader copy.
TW: loss of a child

This book was very slow going for me. I'm about 36% in and have decided to stop reading for now. Nothing really grabbed my attention, even though it has a premise that I would usually enjoy reading. I will likely go back and finish it at some point.

Our Little World by Karen Winn is a highly recommended coming-of-age drama.

Sisters Bee (Bourka) and Audrina Kociss have always been close until recently. Audrina, a year younger than Bee, is pretty, outgoing, and the favorite of everyone, including their parents. While Bee struggles to fit in it seems Audrina does so effortlessly. Neighborhood mothers take turns driving the kids to school and to either the club or the lake during the summer. It is July of 1985 when Max and Sally's mom's takes them all to Deer Chase Lake in New Jersey. This is the day when four-year-old Sally goes missing and changes everyone's illusion of safety and stability. Audrina and Bee's relationship becomes strained and distant under the stress of the disappearance and Bee's move into seventh grade, as well as a secret Bee is holding.

Our Little World is an excellent, well-written, even paced character driven novel coming-of-age drama that examines the complicated relationship between sisters and in families. This is the story of loss and lost innocence as the sisters grow up. Bee is our narrator and tells the story of their complicated relationship, secrets unspoken, harsh words exchanged, and how envy and trauma asserted themselves and changed things. All of the characters are depicted as realistic, believable individuals with flaws, strengths, weaknesses, and secrets.

Winn excels at setting Our Little World during a specific time and place. Those who knew the 1980's will immediately recognize the time period and little tidbits of descriptive information the clearly set the novel in the '80s. Readers will know at the start that Audrina is going to die, but how, when and why won't be answered until much later in the novel. The disappearance (and presumed murder) of Sally changes everyone's life in some way as it is the major occurrence in the first part of the novel that propels the plot forward toward the second part of the novel, which focuses on Audrina.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin Random House via NetGalley.
The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Edelweiss, and Amazon.

On a nice summer day, an unspeakable tragedy occurs, a young girl goes missing. The peaceful tranquility of the town and summer is shattered. This story unfolds in a small town in New Jersey, Hammend. Typically, summer is an idyllic time in this small town, but everything changes after Sally disappears. The story follows Bee Kocsis, as she navigates growing up under this cloud of tragedy. The story follows Bee’s family and Max’s family in the aftermath of Sally’s disappearance. Both families struggle under the weight of this tragedy as Bee’s family lived in the cul-de-sac with Max’s family. The characters were well developed and you really gained an understanding of the issues faced by the children and the families in the aftermath. Finally, after 33 years, what really happened to Sally is resolved. I highly recommend this book. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance review copy in exchange for my honest review.

At first, I wasn’t too sure I was going to like or finish this book. It didn’t seem like something I’d want to read, but it wholeheartedly changed my mind by the end!

This is a heartbreaking coming-of-age tale of sisters and their friends and family.

It’s a mystery (albeit an extremely horrifying one if you’re a parent) and a story of love and shame all rolled into one.

I found myself feeling as though I was growing up in the neighborhood with Bee and Audrina and it was cool to watch them grow and behave as sisters do.

I was afraid there wouldn’t be any answers to the mystery, but it’s solved and it’s sad.

A good read! Recommend!!

This was such a beautiful and heartbreaking book that I wholly recommend if you can handle the content. I loved the coming-of-age story of Bee and all of the supporting characters. As much as I couldn't put this book down, I couldn't wait to find out if there would be any resolution. This book is immediately going on my "best of 2022" list: this is an impressive debut and I will be looking for more from Karen Winn.

This was excellent - I couldn’t put it down. I wasn’t sure I would enjoy it based on the description, but it was poignant and wonderful. It’s a mystery but definitely not a thriller or suspense. It’s more of a family drama and coming-of-age story. I liked the setting in the 80s - it really made things seem simpler, and there were a few plot points that definitely worked better without cell phones.

There’s a few content warnings - child abduction and death, death of a tween (both of these are revealed in the first few pages, so not a spoiler), Type 1 diabetes, adultery, trichotillomania, drug/alcohol abuse, pedophilia (mentioned).

Borka, aka Bee, and her sister Audrina are like most sisters. They love and argue in equal measure. But after their neighbor, 4 year old Sally, goes missing their relationship and their lives begin to change. A book about sisters growing up and growing apart while being shaped by the events surrounding them, Our Little World hits the mark not only by nailing relationships between siblings, but also how quickly tragedy can change the lives of an entire community. Interesting from beginning to end, this book is a great, quick read.

Thanks to NetGalley and Dutton Books for an opportunity to read and ARC of this book.

What a beautiful and heartbreaking coming-of-age novel! Borka (or Bee, as she prefers to be called), has a typical relationship with her sister - when they’re not fighting, they are best friends. They share everything, including a tragedy that shook their town. As Bee grows, she looks back on the childhood that shaped her.

I was shocked to find that this was Karen Winn’s first novel! It was beautifully written, even the parts that were difficult to read. The characters were all so richly complex, including Bee who is at the center of it. It was interesting to read her thoughts as she grew and looked back on her childhood. In the middle of her coming-of-age was a tragedy that would cloud just about everything. Because of that, she often overthought things, saying she would have done certain things differently if only she had known. How often do we think that way? The author did a brilliant job capturing the innocence of youth. This was a unique story but one I’m very glad I read! Thank you to Netgalley, Dutton, MBC Publishing and Karen Winn for the ARC!

Our Little World publishes May 3rd! This review will be posted to my Instagram blog books_by_the_bottle shortly ☺️

**Many thanks to NetGalley, Isabel DaSilva at Dutton, and Karen Winn for an ARC of this book!!**

Take the 80's small-town vibe of Stand by Me...mix in the local girl goes missing from The Lovely Bones...add a heavy pour of sisterly secrets and strife...and you'll end up with Our Little World!

Borka (who prefers to go by Bee, for obvious reasons) is enjoying an idyllic, slow summer day at Deer Chase Lake with her lovable and enigmatic younger sister Audrina and new cutie-across-the-street Max and his four year old sister Sally. It's a typical, carefree, day...until it isn't. Sally goes missing, leaving only part of a charm bracelet in her wake. Nobody saw her vanish from sight, and the police turn up nothing, leaving the town buzzing with speculation and fear quietly building over time. Of course, this leaves Bee and Audrina with their own connection to the incident as the mystery simmers quietly in the background of their adolescence.

As the two grow, so does the widening chasm between them and the tight knit sisters they were and what time has led them to become now. Each sister deals with her own secret, unwilling and in some ways unable to let the other in fully...until a second tragic event alters life for their family forever. Is Sally truly gone...and what led to her disappearance? And can these two sisters who once shared any and everything with one another find their way back before these bonds are altered for good?

If there's one thing this novel focuses on consistently, it's nostalgia. There is absolutely no doubt as to the time period it takes place (even without the Silver Spoons references). See kids, there used to be a time (even slightly before my time, but not by too much) that you could drop by on a neighbor, play in the street until the streetlights came on, and "hog the telephone". The 80s were a simpler time in SO many respects, and this novel emphasizes that fact. Winn's other gift is nailing the idiosyncrasies of childhood: those little bizarre moments and thoughts that take you right back to a time in the living room, waiting for your parents to lay down the hammer with a punishment, or overhearing part of a conversation you weren't meant to hear from down the hall and wondering what it meant. I could easily identify with Bee in those instances, and felt that familiar adolescent uncertainty and curiosity rushing back.

However, this book never really GRABBED me....and I'm not even sure I know why. I normally can pinpoint aspects of a book that just didn't hit me the way they should have, flaws in character development, pacing, structure, etc...but as much as I want to be able to point to any of those characteristics, I can't really explain why I didn't love this book...but I didn't. I do know that I didn't find the story that sad overall, even though it was intended to be tragic, and perhaps it was the narration that kept me from feeling invested with all of the characters? It seemed like there was a lot of emphasis on solving Sally's mystery, but you literally have to wait until the epilogue to find out what happened...so I think dragging things out too long (and lots of unnecessary and incorrect detective work from Bee and a side plot that was never really resolved) didn't help.

Without spoilers it is hard to discuss, but both sister's secrets were just a bit off to me in different ways. I wanted to know these characters inside and out, but I just couldn't read them fully. They all had that small-town feel, but none of them really jumped to life for me. I'm not sure what would have tipped the scales for me...maybe one tragedy to focus on, rather than two? Again, this is all speculation on my part since I'm just not sure what would have taken this book from decent to great in my eyes, and there is a good chance I just wasn't the right reader to appreciate Winn's words fully. While I would certainly consider her future work, this one STILL has me scratching my head and wondering if I am just stuck in MY own little world.

3.5 stars

A dark tale of small town suffering, OUR LITTLE WORLD would be an engaging visit down memory lane, except this tour involves missing children, childhood death, parental infidelity and substance abuse. Most of us did not experience this litany of trauma in our childhoods, regardless of how shaky our families might have been. This tale is told not so much by an unreliable narrator as by an unknowing one. Bee is the less aware sister; she is not the pretty one, the one everyone gravitates towards. She may be the smarter one and the one who sees more of her surroundings but she is unable to process much of what she notices. She stumbles and blunders her way through this tale and we accompany her, all the while wondering if she, or we, are missing some key facts. Author Karen Winn weaves a tight tale of childhood gone astray and sisters at odds. This is a memorable first book for an author that is worth following. This book is difficult to put down once started. I received my copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Not quite sure how to rate this one. I will start off saying that it gave me nightmares for two nights straight as I read it- so it definitely was disturbing at some level.

This is considered a coming-of-age novel, which I find interesting. Most definitely there are aspects of how our choices, while seemingly simple, can make huge waves through time. But the kinds of tragedies/trauma found within these pages are not typical, and will leave your soul aching. Child abduction, family disfunction, infidelity, alcohol abuse, murder, untimely deaths... It is so HEAVY!

Set in the mid 1980's, the author throws in some of the nostalgia of that time from cordless phones, neon spandex to Aqua Net hairspray. That's about where the joy ended for me, though. Max and his sister, Sally move to New Jersey during the heat of the summer and they connect with their neighbors at the local pond. When tragedy strikes, seemingly small indiscretions could mean life or death. There is a lot of in-depth about the struggle between two sisters who walk the line of best friends and enemies.

Again- horrible dreams for days. For that reason I probably couldn't recommend. I do think the writing is well done, it was just far too heavy for my soul to handle.

Thanks to NetGalley and Dutton for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Wow. I finished reading Our Little World at 3am this morning. It’s a wonder I didn’t wake my husband ugly crying.
It didn’t get me vested into the storyline until about halfway through and then I was all in.
The story of a family (mostly the two daughters) and the surrounding neighborhood rings of any small town, until a small child goes missing. Life never returns to normal, whatever normal was before, but the innocence is gone for the youth of the town.
This is definitely a book that is made to be a movie. Just be sure to bring tissues!
#KarenWinn
#OurLittleWorld

Heartfelt story about two sisters and their adolescent years growing up, told from Borka’s point of view. Makes you think about situations in your own life and seeing them from the other person’s perspective. Excellent character development and thorough description of scenes and activities throughout the book. Of course some young love, drama and mystery. Overall a well rounded story that ties everything up at the end with of course a couple of twists along the way.

Thanks to Netgalley and Dutton group for my advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest opinion. @duttonbooks

Our Little World is a coming of age story of two sisters. Bee and Audrina are a year apart in school so they ended up doing a lot together. In 1985, they visit Dee Chase Lake with their neighbors and little 4 year-old Sally goes missing. This shakes up a normally quiet town in New Jersey. For a while no one can go out on their own because the parents were concerned and no one had found Sally. The first part of the book helps us understand the different dynamics that effect a family with something terrible happens. Different people deal with the horrifying events in different ways.

The second part of the book revolves around something terrible that happens in Bee's family. In this part of the book we get to know Bee, Audrina, and their parents better. Everyone is holding in feelings and sometimes horrible thoughts and actions come out. Dealing with loss of does not always bring out the best in people. Many emotions are talked about in this book.

Our Little World is a fast read and I enjoyed it. I stayed up late a couple of nights because this story did suck me in. I would like to thank NetGalley for an advanced copy of Our Little World. #NetGalley #OurLittleWorld #KarenWinn

I love the setting! This was heartbreaking but lovely. I felt that the reading dragged a little but it was interesting enough for me to push through to see the ending!

Our Little World is ultimately about sisters Audrina and Bee.
The sisters are excited when new neighbors move in across the street and quickly become friends with Max and his little sister Sally. A day at the lake becomes a nightmare when four year old Sally goes missing. This has a tremendous impact on the sisters lives as well as the whole town.

You know right from the start of the book some of the things that will happen. But you will not know HOW or WHY they happened. It was a very interesting story, if a little drawn out at times.

The dynamics of the sisters relationship was realistic to how young girls interact with each other and others around them. The ending was the most thought provoking part of the book for me.

Thanks you to Isobel at Penguin Group Dutton for the widget via netgalley

I was intrigued by Our Little World from the first paragraph. The story follows sisters, Bee and Audrina, in the summer of 1985 when their neighbor and friend goes missing from the local lake while they are all spending a summer day together.

While the story centers around the disappearance of Sally, Bee and Audrina's relationship is at the center as they find themselves moving from inseparable and close, to distant and fractured. The writing is powerful and each chapter will leave you wanting to read "just one more chapter," despite it being heart-wrenching at times.

Beautifully written - I recommend checking out Our Little World.

4/5 stars

Thank you Dutton Books and NetGalley for the digital ARC!

I appreciate the copy of Our Little World from Penguin Dutton Publishers, a publisher I have come to associate with strong literary books that are character driven. Our Little World by Karen Winn is a welcome example of strong writing and character development.

1. Coming of Age: I thought the blend of themes on coming of age with hints of mystery were well done; coming of age in a way always involves that emerging awareness of the adult world and lives, and loss/confusion, that comes with adulthood and developmental transitions. I think this book does reflect this coming of age feeling well.
2. Thoughtful Narrative: The book takes its time to develop the story but moves to a satisfying end. I liked how the end didn't fade into a rushed resolution.
3. Caring for Loved Ones: I liked that this book introduces subtle themes on why we should pay attention to others we love and care for; all too often these days our lives are busy, filled with distraction, and yet the past two years have been a time of returning to being present and engaged. This book is a nice reminder of why slowing down and being in the moment can matter.

Recommended for readers who like Notes on Her Sudden Disappearance, also coming soon.