I really really wanted to love this book. As a craftsman of characters, world and words, Ann as always is remarkable in this book, however, the story felt dragged out and not half as inspiring as her other books.

I kept wondering if I had a physical copy of the book I could hold the pages in my hand I would connect with the book more like I did with her book. Hello beautiful perhaps my expectations were unreasonably high

This book at its core is about women from different generations, dealing with similar issues of life, but reacting to them very differently. Their reactions to love and loss and relationships are all based on the decade they were born in. These women are strong as hell, and yet deeply flawed, but their flaws are exactly what kept me reading.

I feel that well, so much care is taken into developing the female characters of the story. The men are mere shadows. and while I enjoyed this aspect in her other book,in this one, I found it frustrating

For once I don’t know how to rate this book because I love the skill of this writer, but I did not enjoy this particular book, so make it what you will and decide for yourself whether you want to read it or not.

To know me is to know how much I appreciate a sweeping family saga, and Within Arm's Reach didn't disappoint. This is a rerelease of Napolitano's debut novel, and I'm so glad it popped up on NetGalley! She paints such a clear picture of the McLaughlin family, it felt like I was sitting alongside them at the dining room table.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for the ARC!

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

Within Arm's Reach is Ann Napolitano debut novel brought back at the request of her readers.

I am so glad they did.

This is the compelling story of the McLaughlin family told from the pov of 5 family members.

Catherine is the matriarch of this huge Irish family and like all families there are secrets, there is infighting and there is the glue that will hold them together.

Ann Napolitano does a wonderful job of making all the characters feel real and very relatable and when Catherine/Gram is failing in health the family pulls together.

I quite enjoyed Within Arm's Reach and I will think about the McLaughlin family for days to come.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for re-releasing this wonderful family drama.

⭐️3
Debut novel before her well-liked book, Hello Beautiful.

This one is a family drama centered around a large, Irish Catholic family. The three main characters that stood out to me were the granddaughters Gracie and Lila and the matriarch Catherine.

This one had too many POV and the plot of the story was lacking. There were extra subplots, but I felt like nothing ever came of them. The ending felt abrupt and left me hanging.

This book didn’t work for me. I think it would interest readers who love to read about family dysfunction and the chaos of unhealthy relationships.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my truthful review.

Publication date: April 30, 2024

This is a rerelease of Ann Napolitano's first book. It focuses on 3 generations of an Irish Catholic family. There is an awful light of angst and everyone seems terribly unhappy with there lives. It was difficult to engage with the characters and I ultimately was frustrated with their decisions.

The only reason I’m not giving this book 5 stars is because the ending felt too abrupt and left me feeling like there should have been more to the story. However, this was a really great book.

Ann Napoolitano is a genius and I will read anything she writes. She has a really beautiful and unique way of writing about the human condition.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC of this book. This was such a disappointing read!! The ending was too abrupt and left so much story just hanging there. The characters and story were great but the ending ruined the whole book for me.

Spanning three generations, this narrative delves into the lives of the Irish McLaughlins, a family marked by their struggle to communicate on matters that truly count, weighed down by their shared history of loss and silent grief. Not only a story about family; it is a mirror reflecting the universal human condition: our innate desire for connection, the complexities of love and loyalty, and the courage it takes to confront our deepest fears. The McLaughlin family, with all their flaws and complexities, become a vessel for exploring these timeless themes - the unsaid, the unresolved and the unhealed.

This book wasn’t my favorite of Ann’s books. She did a great job bringing the characters to life. I just didn’t really like any of them. The book felt really slow. Maybe family dramas aren’t for me. If they are your thing, I’m sure you will love this book.

Is there anyone in the world who can articulate the beauty, drama, and torture of a family like Ann Napolitano? I think not.

I despised these people for the first half of the book… until I realized I just RELATED TO THEM. this could be my family (or more likely, my husband’s). At one point, I burst into tears with how elegantly Ann described feeling safe in your father’s presence.

This is a rerelease after 20 years, so the story itself felt weak compared to her other masterpieces Dear Edward and Hello, Beautiful. But if you like her writing style and family sagas, you’ll likely enjoy this slow burn. The ending was a bit wishy-washy, but I like that I can imagine what comes next.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an early copy!

This book did not hold my interest and I am so disappointed as I loved Hello Beautiful and Dear Edward by this author. Just too many characters to keep track of and I dnf at 23%. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this advance copy but it was not for me.

I am a big fan of Ann Napolitano books. She always writes interesting stories about complex characters with messy family dynamics. This story revolves around Grace …a young woman with an unplanned pregnancy and how the different members of her family react. The underlying story is unmanaged grief of the loss of a child many years before and how it reverberates through out the years.
My one quibble is the use of the Immaculate conception as a way Grace thinks (as a joke) to explain her pregnancy. There are so many books that rely on this plot point . The problem is … the Immaculate Conception is when Mary is conceived without original sin in preparation to be the mother of Jesus. It is not when Jesus was conceived . Not sure why editors continue to let this go.
Thanks NetGalley for the chance to read this arc in exchange for an honest review.

Hello Beautiful was one of my favorite books of 2023 so I was extremely excited to learn about this book and get an arc. I also read Dear Edward, making this the third book by Ann Napolitano. I wish I enjoyed this book half as much as the other 2. I felt there were too many main characters and truthfully I did not particularly like or care about any of them. I come from a very talkative Jewish family and I just couldn't relate to the Irish stuff upper lips. I also could have done without the praying. I would try any future books by Ann and while I didn't enjoy it, I'm probably in the minority and most readers will enjoy this book.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House for an eARC for this book.

Within Arm's Reach is a family saga following three generations of Irish-American women living in New Jersey in 2001. This was apparently Ann's debut and is being republished which made sense to me once I started reading it. After reading the stunning Hello Beautiful I was expecting the same level of writing and story telling in this book and it wasn't quite there. You can tell she has become a fantastic writer throughout her career.

Within Arm's Reach is full of emotionally stunted family members that have generational trauma just passed down constantly and never dealt with. No one is happy and everyone really loses it when the oldest grand-daughter (she's 29) announces she's pregnant and will keep it as a single parent. The entire extended family takes it personally and it was ODD, like get a grip. If this was my family I would go no contact and happily live my life far away from them but it's still fascinating to read about since my family would never.

Overall, if you love Ann's writing and story telling give this one a chance, just know it's an older book of hers being re-published!

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an ARC of this novel.

The character who quite simply reigns over this story is the indomitable Catherine, matriarch of the large, unruly Irish-American McLaughlin family. She has borne nine children, of whom six have survived to adulthood, all of whom live fairly close to their childhood small town New Jersey home. When the story opens, Catherine has been widowed for nearly 30 years and lives in an upscale seniors’ residence where she remains resolutely, fiercely, independent.
Her age and growing physical and mental deterioration—of which she is more aware than anyone, but the McLaughlins are always ‘fine’—do not stop her from dominating her adult children’s lives. She is especially close to her ‘now eldest’ daughter Kelly (her eldest died as a toddler), Kelly’s husband Louis Leary, and their twenty-something daughters, Gracie and Lila. The gentle and kind Louis had never won his hard-drinking hard-driving father-in-law’s approval. Perhaps to compensate, he is more compassionate with Catherine than are her own children. Gram dotes on Gracie and Lila, and they are very attached to her. They only half-jokingly describe her as ‘the iron glove.’

As there would be in a multigenerational saga about a sprawling Irish-Catholic family, the principal cast is huge, and so is the secondary roster of characters who flit in and out with memorable parts to play. Most of these are the siblings and their children, but each of the Learys—the story’s focus—draws in a particular ‘outsider’ who exerts significant influence on them and the larger clan. And especially on their self development. Catherine, the Learys, and their daughters each present their point of view. We get a strong sense of just how alike they are even while they so often fail to understand each other.

That’s already a lot of POVs for a novel of less than 300 pages. The introduction of a sixth point of view, that of nurse Noreen Ballin, especially so late in the novel, seems unnecessary, though Noreen is important. All the characters have their human fallibilities, but the family as a group, with Kelly maintaining loudly that she has ‘carried’ them since the patriarch’s death, is too often just obnoxious—repressed, quick to judgment, selfish, childish and plain nasty. And for all their professed closeness, the girls and their grandmother manipulate and use each other, for attention and money. There are many times none of these people related by blood and marriage seem to like each other, but they are always wailing and worrying. This is not untrue of many real families. But there’s not much to explain why they are like this when they, and Catherine, lament how things have changed since their happy closeness as children. Yet neither Catherine nor the late patriarch were warm affectionate parents, nor did they believe it was their job to be that way. They wanted their kids to be tough. Ironically, they are all very fragile.

I was surprised to learn that this is an unaltered reissue of one of Napolitano’s early works, now out of print. It is an honorable precursor to her recent bestseller, Hello Beautiful, also about an Irish American family and the sisters’ relationships. The echoes are not surprising, though, given that she draws from her own family background; in her epilogue, she explains how Catherine is based very closely on her grandmother, who was a force in her childhood. This novel deserved much better than the lukewarm reception she says it received on its first publication. Like the subsequent bestsellers, it is beautifully written, and comes to a satisfying conclusion that may not be that ‘true’ but nonetheless makes for a good story.

Ann Napolitano’s reissued debut novel Within Arm’s Reach touches our hearts in unexpected ways as did her more recent books, Hello Beautiful and Dear Edward. This story centers around three generations of the Irish American Catholic McLaughlin family. It is told from five different viewpoints and personalities. At first it was difficult to keep the characters straight in my mind, but as I read more, it became easier. Catherine, the grandmother and matriarch of this family, has insights about her daughter Kelly, Kelly’s husband Louis, and her two granddaughters, Gracie and Lila. In turn each character shares their reactions to each other as only family members can. The unmarried and pregnant Gracie is somehow a catalyst in the family’s drama. Some of the themes in this book include generational challenges, acceptance of other people’s differences, and personal heartbreak. I highly recommend this book to people who enjoy Ann Napolitano’s ability to write from the heart. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for an advance copy of this book.

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group, and Dial Press Trade Paperback for the ARC of Within Arm's Reach. I was so excited about reading this novel after Hello Beautiful was one of my favorite reads of 2023, but I was sadly disappointed. I was unaware this is a rerelease of Napolitano's first novel from 2007 and not a new work, and honestly, I think it shows. This one definitely reads slower than I anticipated and I did not connect with the characters as much I anticipated. While the writing is beautiful, this one was not for me. I will definitely read more from Napolitano, just wouldn't recommend this one.

This is a re-release of Anne’s first novel from 2007. I think it’s great to see some of her work again but as a reader you notice that her skill has improved.

Personally, I struggled to get into this story. The writing felt choppy and some of the family history was darker than I was expecting.

This one wasn’t for me, unfortunately.

Thank you NetGalley and Dial Press for this advanced copy!

I can’t fault the writing of this book and I’m guessing that it will be very popular because people today seem to like melodramas about unhappy people and this book has that in spades. It’s a giant soap opera about the generally dysfunctional relationships within a large, ethnically Irish, Catholic family and all the ways the individuals seem bent on making themselves and their loved ones even more miserable. It is told from six viewpoints — Catherine, the matriarch; her eldest daughter Kelly; Kelly’s husband Louis; their two children Gracie and Lila; and the nurse who attends Catherine after a fall (who has other unexpected connections to the family). I was hoping the end would either be uplifting or teach me something but I got … nada. There was also a pattern of emotional women being “saved” by decent, well-grounded, men. While there is honestly nothing wrong with that, it doesn’t seem like something to aim for.

I really loved Napolitano’s “Hello Beautiful”, and heard wonderful things about “Dear Edward” (I could not bring myself to read that book because it sounded so depressing), but while the writing was good and the characters well-drawn, the only characters I liked at all were the ones that had tied themselves voluntarily to this troubled family and I honestly couldn’t figure out why they ever would have done that…

Some quotes that I think illustrate my point:

“… there’s little point in drawing all of my brothers and sisters and their families together. What you get when we are all in the same room is not love. It is a potent combination of our childhood, my father‘s anger, and my mother’s deliberate silence and pointless, barbed comments. It is the long, thin, thorny end of the rose.”

“Why would I be working hard? And for what? For Gram? That isn’t enough of a reason. Life isn’t supposed to be hard. F*** that. Gram is wrong. I’ll end up like uncle Pat, sitting like a popsicle on the edge of a folding chair, feeling nothing. And Gram wouldn’t want that. I picture Weber’s face, bright with happiness.”

“She has the ability to make a decision and then inflate her emotions like a bicycle tire until they back up the decision with no wiggle room.”