This book was a joy to read! It covers a the life of four siblings, a set of triplets and their sister born 17 years later, and how they navigate being a family. Their story is long, complicated and emotional but filled with honesty and humor. I was surprised by the intricate stoylines, nothing seemed farfetched or stretched to fill in the connections.

This author is pretty hit-or-miss for me and I didn’t find this book to be one of her stronger ones.
The majority of the story focuses on a set of triplets, who are all pretty terrible people, especially to each other, and their parents who are no more likable than their children. The first half is just drawn-out and boring. It starts picking up around halfway, but doesn’t get actually enjoyable until about three-quarters of the way through, when the last sibling becomes an active part of the narrative.
Thanks to #netgalley and #celadonbooks for this #arc of #thelatecomer in exchange for an honest review.

This was a book I wanted to loved. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t for me. I was not invested in these characters and lost interest rather quickly! I told myself maybe I’ll pick it up at another time but I just have no desire to get back to this one. This book might not be for everyone but the author’s writing style is unique. If you like a slow long burn, character driven novel this one is definitely for you.

While this author has a strong backlist of books published, this is my first book by Jean Hanff Korelitz!

The Latecomer is definitely a well-developed character driven novel that has more focus on the characters than perhaps the overall story arc. I enjoyed the book but wondered if some of the volume could have been reduced? I used to love a slow burn but perhaps with this season of life, I am enjoying the slow burn format less an less. Regardless, there is a lot of material to sink your teeth into with this book. I can’t even imagine how brilliant this author is to conjure up so many intricate storylines in one book. Heavy on the intricate storylines but light on the novel’s plot. I did enjoy how the stories came together (finally) but it took us a while to get there! The overall experience yielded a strong book rating.

I liked this narrator because I recently listened to her in two other audiobooks. But I did not like her in this one. I gave it to 30 percent and then I stopped listening. I did leave a nice feature for it on my instagram and kept things positive. I linked it below.

Thanks to NetGalley for the audiobook ARC!

Simply put, The Latecomer is one of the best books I've ever read. And I've read a lot of books, so that's saying something!

I kept comparing this to The Goldfinch in my mind as I read it. The depth of the characters, the art references and the importance of art to the plot, and the emotional drama are all points of comparisons. The characters really feel like friends or relatives by the end, and the drama feels very real.

With terrific narration as well, this audiobook is definitely a must-listen. I would highly recommend to fans of Donna Tartt, Delia Owens, and literary fiction in general.

Thank you to @netgalley for this free ALC. I was blown away by Korelitz previous novel The Plot. The Latecomer was good but felt a bit lacking to me. Apparently I am in a phase of reading books that aren't really about what their blurb says they're about. Yes, this is about the latecomer, but it's primarily about the setup of the family before the latecomer and then how she propels events within the family. It was a good story, and as a friend pointed out, spent a lot of time on character development and less on plot. The audio was well done; Julian Whalen does not disappoint. I will be happy to read more from Korelitz in the future.

An absolute delight of a book for fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid. The narrator helps the story pop and come alive, as you are pulled into the Oppenheimers, and rooting for this dysfunctional family.

I enjoy everything Julia Whelan reads. This one was no exception. Great read for anyone who loves family dramas. You should only read this one if you love books about people and enjoy a story that is focused on characters more than driving a fast paced plot.

✨🌹 BOOK REVIEW: The Latecomer 🌹✨

Thanks to @netgalley for gifting me the audio arc of #thelatecomer!

Author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
Genre: literary fiction
Mood: emotional, reflective, challenging
Rating: ⭐️⭐️.5/5

#readandsiprecommends to read if you:
•only go to family holidays for the drama
•like when you dislike all the characters
•want something that brings you back to your college days

Review: I’ve seen some rave reviews of this one and I’ll just say it wasn’t for me. The storytelling jumped around a bit too much and it was hard to follow between characters and timelines.

For the title and description being on the “latecomer” child you really don’t get any of her story, which is sort of what I was expecting the focus to be. Instead you get a deep dive into each of the Oppenheimer triplets’ stories. Each of them is interesting in their own way, though backstories are totally drawn out in detail in my opinion. I also had a hard time connecting with why they hate each other so much. There wasn’t a ton of back story they just seemed to treat each other poorly from the start and couldn’t wait to get away from one another.

I did find the fast forward to present day toward the end interesting to see where the triplets ended up and get more on the latecomer child.

This is well-written and the audio was engaging, I just don’t think this story is for me. I’m definitely glad I did this one as an audio during a long car ride, because I don’t know if I could have stuck through it otherwise.

🚨 TW: infertility, infidelity, outing, religious bigotry, car accident

Great writing elevates this fairly unoriginal tale of a privileged but messy and unlikable family that doesn’t get along and finds itself drifted completely apart. Obviously though, the writing is not quite good enough to ignore the idea that I have read this before or to make me wonder why I should care about them not getting along in the first place.

The Latecomer follows a set of triplets born to a rich Jewish couple in New York who grow up without every really getting along or being a family. One struggles with their sexuality, one struggles with their religion, and one struggles with their political beliefs and all struggle to be decent people. When the kids are graduating, their mother upon finding out that her husband is cheating on her and probably going to leave with his new family decides to use the last egg from the IVF treatment saved from 18 years ago, essentially making a fourth twin but born 18 years later. When Phoebe is old enough to realize the mess of her family she works to try and fix it.


I will repeat that the writing of this is really well done and I will definitely check out the author’s other novels which I have been intrigued about. Despite being very slow with the ‘plot’ of the story not kicking in until at least half way through, I never felt like quitting. It kept me engaged with the smaller segments of action that each sibling or parent was going through. But when I stepped back and looked at the overall picture, I couldn’t really bring myself to be that interested.

The characters do in fact, grow (with one exception). Except this entirely happens off stage. We follow the kids while they are in their first year of college and generally being assholes then it skips 16 plus years. Where two of them have settled and smoothed out the rough edges we saw previously and one of them has leaned even more into them. Somehow, the character that hasn’t developed at all, gets the exact same treatment as the other two. I’m not even trying to get political here (though it is hard with this character being a literal commentator for Fox News) but there is no development from him or growth. Yet he gets the same ending. Its very odd and a weird message. I can’t imagine liberals like me will enjoy this character being accepted as such with zero growth and I can’t imagine conservatives would like that their ‘representative’ character is just an asshole in general without including his political views. So who was this book for? I have no real idea.

Everything felt all wrapped up in a tidy bow that felt undeserved and un-journeyed for us as readers.

I did actually enjoy the one character’s exploration of religion. I found this super interesting that someone who lacked a sense of family and community attaches themselves to a religion (LDS) that has such strong bonds. It was actually a really interesting emotional journey that I felt I understood more than anything else. I also loved the exploration of religion through art that he had. He did turn out to be my favorite character and the most interesting one to me.

There really was interesting parts and segments but they sure did make it hard to really care about them.

Overall, really well written but generally a miss for me.

Sadly this was just not a book that resonated with me. I though the audio was done extremely well and Julia Whelan never misses for me. This book just felt too long to listen to and I think it may have been better as a physical read so sadly it was a DNF for me.

Thanks to MacMillan Audio and NetGalley for the ALC

Salo and Johanna Oppenheimer have triplets born during the early days of IVF. With Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally soon to go off to college, Johanna decides to have another baby, using the fourth embryo that was frozen when the triplets were created. The triplets have never been close and can’t wait to go their separate ways.

Given the blurb on the back of this book, I expected most of the book to focus on the fourth baby brought into the world 17 years after her siblings. However, the first ¾ of the book focuses on the triplets’ first year of college, and only in the last quarter of the book do we see more than a brief glance of “the baby”.

This is one of those stories where none of the characters are likeable, and that always impedes my enjoyment of a book. It was also an extremely long book that I feel could have been trimmed down. There are a lot of other people who liked the book, though, so if it sounds like something you would enjoy, don’t let my review deter you.

Many thanks to NetGalley for providing me an audio ARC of this book.

3.5 stars took me way way too long to get through.

When I started reading, based on this author's previous books, I was expecting a mystery/suspense novel. I quickly realized that this is not that book. It's a family drama that covers years of life in a wealthy New York family. There are marriages, infertility, babies, infidelity, death, lies, and redemption.

This is a multi-layered tale, and I felt like Korelitz did justice to this family in letting the reader know their various motivations, insecurities, tragedies and triumphs. Each character felt fully developed to me and I could identify with each of them in various ways.

This is a slow, slow burn of a book. More of a character study than anything. I liked it when I finished, but I felt like at times it was a slog to wade through the extreme length and detail. I listened to part of this as an audiobook and the narrator definitely kept me interested and invested.

If you go into this book with the correct mindset of the type of book it is, then you might enjoy it. Just know that the writing is very strong, but you may lose the thread because the plot is not.

Special thanks to Mauricio and NetGalley for the audio edition of this ARC..

Now that I have an audio device, I think I'm going a little crazy with audio. My first audiobook, I could take the story, but not the voice. This one, I liked the reader but it was slow going for me up til about 3/4 of the book but I loved the different voice and emotion the reader had.

I didn't find the story that great and to tell the truth, the audio made all the difference for me. Anyhow, at 65-75% of the book, it got really interesting. I will just tell you a bit about why I liked it so much, in case you start reading it and don't want to stick with it. Johanna, the mother, and Call the father were having trouble having kids so they did IVF and had froze some eggs. Anyway Johanna finds she's got triplets the first time. 2 boys and a girl. The triplets are not close as most would be and really had different personalities. Before they were born, the father Salo, while in Europe fell in love with art and while Johanna rooted on her children, Walk cited on his art. By day working, and by night spending time with his beloved art collection, which he moved into a factory for safe-keeping. Very expensive art. I liked the description of the paintings and the art because I just lost my mom and she was a state winning first place winning artist and gave lessons for years. Also sad for me because she gave a LOT of it away with her dementia and most pictures are lost. I only could identify with Salon for this, otherwise I didn't like him very much.

As time goes by, the three children grow to 18, mostly apart. It seemed they never liked to be with the other. Pretty strange for triplets but as they went off to college at 18, Johanna the mother, gets depressed and she gets an idea. She does have one more egg, "the latecomer". Phoebe. Don't give up on this book people, especially in audio. The last part of the book well, I don't want to give it away. Its not a great big twist, but you'll be glad you did. Its heartwarming, and lovely.

I enjoyed this story - especially the parts about the different people falling in love with different mediums of art. It was very interesting to see the art through their eyes and gain a fresh perspective.

I found the idea that the triplets didn't get along, ever, to be so completely unbelievable and a bit cold. They may have had different personalities and interests, but all children play together and enjoy eachothers company at some point, usually quite often over their 18 years together at home. The flat-out denial of this seemed unrealistic to me. As did the portrayal of the mother as a weak person who pretended to have a happy family. Good parents want to provide a happy home for their children - this is not a bad thing. As a mom, I found this to be way off the mark of reality.

Johanna Oppenheimer wanted a child of her own. No matter how many times she tried and failed to get pregnant, she was determined. She had the best doctor in New York City working for her, but still month after month, her body just didn’t cooperate. They talked to her about adoption, but she wouldn’t hear it. She wanted a child of her own. She had four chances left, four fertilized eggs to try. The doctor implanted three of the eggs, and she went home with her husband Salo for what she thinks will be one last disappointment. Instead, she ending up giving birth to three kids.

The Oppenheimer triplets—Harrison, the smart one; Lewyn, the weird one; and Sally, the girl—don’t get along from the start. Through the years, Johanna is the one taking care of the kids. She protects them, cares for them, and spends time with them. Meanwhile, Salo protects, cares for, and spends time with his children—the art that he collects.

Salo first fell in love with art when he was traveling in Europe as a young man. There was one painting in particular that stopped him in his tracks. He actually fell over, and the guards had to put him in a chair until he recovered. He bought that piece and had it transported to the states. It was his first, but there were many more pieces to come. When the babies came along, Salo bought a warehouse in Brooklyn and added all the safeguards he needed to keep his art safe. By day, he worked at his family’s finance business, but he spent his evenings with his art.

When the triplets went off to college, Johanna found out that Salo had been unfaithful to her. So when she got an invoice from the lab that still had her last egg in storage, she took action. They hired a surrogate, and Johanna found herself with an infant all over again. As the older triplets are finding their places in the world, their younger sister Phoebe is getting her feet under her, literally. But once she becomes a teenager and is faced with her future (the constant questions about those college applications), she spends time with her siblings, trying to figure out what she wants, she also finds herself uncovering long-held secrets and learning who the members of the Oppenheimer family truly are.

Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer is a searing novel of grief and regret, forgiveness and healing that takes one family apart to see just how the pieces all come together. It’s a slow ride through much of the story, but that final third has all the payoffs for the reader, so all that patience pays off deep dividends. Like Korelitz’s novel The Plot, there is a lot going on in this family drama, but it’s worth every word.

I listened to the audio of The Latecomer, narrated by Julia Whelan. Whelan has long been one of my favorite audiobook voices, as her professionalism comes through in every word. She can nail an accent, but more than that, she imbues her reading with such emotion that I couldn’t help getting drawn into the lives of these Oppenheimers, even the ones that were more challenging to like. I would definitely recommend this as an audiobook. I think if I had been trying to read it myself, I would have given up in one of the slower spots.

Overall, I liked The Latecomer a lot. There is a lot of talk of artists and art, but mostly it is a story of humanity. It’s about the mistakes we make and what we put ourselves through to pay for those mistakes. It’s about love and loss, about family and forgiveness, about the choices that define us and what we leave behind in our unfinished relationships. It is moving and heart-warming and makes you want to hug all your relatives, even the ones who may appear at times on Fox News. But seeing how this story comes together at the end can restore your faith in humanity and give you the strength you need to face the next day. At least, it did for me.

An early copy of the audiobook for The Latecomer was provided by Macmillan Audio through NetGalley, with many thanks.

How do you follow up a hit novel? Jean Hanff Korelitz is no stranger to success. She's on the heels of last year's hit book The Plot and an HBO miniseries based on her novel You Should Have Known. I was eager to read whatever she came up with next, and I was lucky that her publisher sent me a copy of her latest novel The Latecomer. Hanff Korelitz didn't write another thriller this time. She's gone about as far in the opposite direction as you could possibly go, electing to write a searing family drama that sprawls multiple generations. Having not read a synopsis before diving in, I was caught a bit off guard by the genre and content, but I pressed on nonetheless.

The Oppenheimer family of New York is one of those wealthy established clans representing society's pinnacle during the 1970s. Like other prominent Jewish families of the time, they have found the perfect balance between running a family-owned business and socializing with others in their class. This generation aspires to leave their children better off than they are, and the Oppenheimer family is doing just that. Their son Salo is primed to take over everything and ensure a proper future for the Oppenheimer name.

Salo Oppenheimer's ascent to being the head of the family saw the young man carve his own path. He married Johanna, but instead of buying a home in Manhattan, moved to the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. While maintaining the family business, Salo grew fascinated with collecting "outsider art". As this hobby flourished, he eventually purchased a warehouse in Brooklyn to house his collection.

With her husband spending much of his free time away from the home, young Johanna Oppenheimer longed for the companionship that comes with a family. There was only one problem. Johanna was unable to conceive a child. Desperate to have children of her own, Johanna turned to the relatively new practice of in-vitro fertilization. Three eggs were used with a fourth frozen away as a last-ditch effort should she be unable to carry the child herself. To both the Oppenheimer's and their doctor's surprise, the process was a huge success with each of the three eggs successfully coming to term.

The three Oppenheimer children were siblings in name and blood only. Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally really couldn't have been more different if they tried. As they grew into adulthood, Johanna saw her dream of one big happy family drifting further and further away. Her husband continued to spend his time with his art, and the children, now destined for college, took up their own interests away from each other. In a desperate attempt for one final shot at a family, Johanna decided to use that final forgotten egg to have a fourth child. This 'latecomer' would be born into a fragmented family and be burdened with the duty to try and bring them each together.

I was blinded by my own expectations when I started reading this book. I couldn't help but compare this quiet family drama with the fast-paced thriller that the author presented only last year. So let's get this out of the way. The Latecomer is a vastly different novel from The Plot. As I slowly overcame those expectations and allowed myself to be enveloped by the time, place, and characters that Hanff Korelitz conjured, I began to appreciate the depth of the novel I was reading. This is a multigenerational family drama with plenty of dry humor and social commentary peppered in. At nearly 500 pages, Hanff Korelitz gives herself ample room to explore themes on family, marriage, race, sexuality, religion, and politics. While I found each of these elements worthy of the time devoted to them, I don't feel that there was a cohesive narrative thread tying them all together. This resulted in an ending that to me didn't exactly deliver on everything that came before it. That being said, I was so invested in the entire saga of the Oppenheimer family that I just had to see it all the way through. The Latecomer is a daring character study from a prominent author that will likely pay off in different ways depending on your tastes and the expectations you place upon it.

2.5 stars

I am not saying it's a good or bad book, It was not for me.

I thought it will be a real mystery, but it turned out to be the story of a family written in a very long and detailed way. The mystery side is pretty tiny and insignificant.

Thank you NetGalley and Macmillan Audio. for allowing me to read this book!

Honestly I tried to love this book. I just couldn’t get into the character changes. We start with the parents, then go to the kids, and in the kids section we jump between children. It just didn’t feel direct enough and it caused me to keep losing interest. This especially happened when the next character would start. I also didn’t realize that the narrator was the sister until probably half way through. It kept sounding like sister number one and if you didn’t pay close enough attention you would miss the cues that it was sister number two.

It also definitely needs some content warnings as it deals with many dark topics such as vehicle death, hoarding, alcoholism, indoctrination, anti semitism, neglect, and more.