When the Harvest Comes delves into a man's conflicting feelings around love, grief, religion, sexuality, and gender. Davis is a up and coming viola player who brings their own style and flare to the stuffy world of classical music. Davis is supported by their soon to be husband Everett, and early the book they travel to Everett's family's home to get married. Davis is estranged from their father (who is called "The Reverend") and their sister also isn't coming to the wedding. Their mother died when Davis was quite young. Davis is looking forward to the support of Everett's family and musical opportunities that are coming.

During the wedding reception, Davis learns that the reverend has died in a car accident and their world turns upside down. Much of this book is about complicated grief around their relationship with their father and how that affects their relationship with their now husband Everett, as Davis starts to withdraw. There's a lot of internal struggles that Davis goes through in this book, and Norris writes the challenging emotions well. I have some minor quibbles in some heavy handedness on Everett's MAGA-curious brother, and Davis' latter journey into their gender was a bit out of left field.

Thank you to Random House via NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for honest review.

Oooh my heart. When I read the synopsis I knew it was going to break and it did. But the book was great and I definitely see this one being a popular one this year.

Denne Michele Norris delivers a beautiful novel about love, family, identity, and the inescapable pull of reconciling with your past. The novel follows Davis, a young Black gay man coming to terms with the death of his father and their painful history. The prose is stunning, rich with emotion and atmosphere, though the pacing feels either rushed or too slow at different times in the novel. Overall, it was an intimate and immersive read.

4 stars

This debut is a smash. It's extremely emotional and at times both heart and gut wrenching, but it is ultimately a story of hope and resilience and rising.

The central couple have experienced the recent loss of a particularly complicated parent, and as these things sometimes go, there's much more than just the complexities of grief to unpack in this departure. The loss not only impacts them as individuals but as a couple, and the results ripple out into the larger circles of their extended family. The focal points are in individual characters, in the central romantic relationship, in the famililal relationships, and - most engagingly - in the evolution of the self. I'm staying very vague on purpose. Readers should let the characters tell them what's happening, not external parties.

I hope there are many future efforts to come from Norris. This book runs a bit dark by nature of the central motifs, but it is hopeful and beautiful overall.

I am absolutely gutted by this story. Heartbroken is an understatement. These characters have stolen my heart and I am in awe of this beauitful writing.

3.5 At times, the story was hard to follow between the two timelines. This is definitely a story that needs to be told. I enjoyed the author's writing style and the characters. I look forward to reading more books from this author in the future. #WhentheHarvestComes #NetGalley

Sorry, not what I thought it would be. The write-up talked about Cleveland and Montauk, and a loving family story.

Much too graphic for my taste in novels, the middle half of the book was intriguing and well written, but it got weird in the end and I quickly need to read a different book.

This is not a book I can review honestly. It is an intimate very sexual novel about homosexual men who are struggling with past experiences and new relationships. The sex is graphic and I felt uncomfortable . There is an audience for this genre, it’s just not me.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.

It was an absolute pleasure and privilege to get early access to this book and I WILL be preordering a copy of it to own for my home library. It was gorgeous and overall took my breath away, and such an important piece of literature so intimate and soulful. One of my favourite reads of 2025.

This was an emotional read. It has grief, identity issues, trauma, and will take you on a roller coaster ride of emotions.

While Davis's story is impactful and an important one this book lost me when it came to the plot. It was either rushed in parts or completely lost in others. I don't mind stories with dual timelines but this one just jumped to much and too quickly from past to present.

However the author's writing is done beautifully and an excellent debut

When the Harvest Comes broke my heart, a little.

This book is a sad but hopeful exploration of trauma and love between Davis and Everett, their pasts and their future, and is above all a beautiful story of finding oneself and each other. I could try to lay out the core of the story, but trying to put the plot into a 100 word summary will never do it justice. Davis' journey is a study in grief, in love, and of family and relationships.

Large spoilers: <spoiler> The letter from The Reverend with the name suggestion made me absolutely bawl. </spoiler>

Thanks to the author/NetGalley/Publisher for allowing me to read this book.

3/5 ⭐

Thanks, NetGalley, for the e-arc in exchange for my review!

I really loved the subject matter but parts of this felt disjointed and dare I say random? The narrative shifted perspectives and sometimes I felt a few were unnecessary? Parts of the book (e.g., main romantic relationship) felt too good to be true and not realistic. I think all in all the book was a bit too ambitious and the pacing really showed this.

All that said, I was rooting for the characters! I liked the majority of them and there was some pretty good character development even with the side characters. The representation that this book provides is incredible as it breaks many gender roles! The ending I think was supposed to be shocking but I wasn't shocked. Still powerful though, it just felt drawn out.

I understand this is Denne Michele Norris's debut novel and I'd be curious to read what they write in the future.

This beautifully rendered novel is a poignant meditation on the complexities of love—romantic, familial, and self-affirming. At its heart is Davis Freeman, a gifted violist on the cusp of a new life with his beloved Everett. The opening scene, set on the eve of their wedding, brims with hope and tenderness, capturing Davis’s quiet defiance and longing for beauty as he prepares to meet Everett at the altar. Yet, even as he steps into his future, Davis carries the weight of his past—a burden that comes crashing back when he learns of his estranged father’s devastating car accident.

The novel is an achingly intimate portrayal of a man striving for freedom and a searing examination of the generational wounds that bind and break families. The strained relationship between Davis and his father, the venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman, is drawn with heartbreaking nuance. The Reverend’s strictness and intolerance once drove Davis away, yet the news of his father’s accident stirs unresolved grief and complicated love. Through a series of raw and deeply affecting flashbacks, the narrative explores the pain of rejection, the longing for parental acceptance, and the healing power of self-reclamation.

The writing is lyrical and evocative, with music as a powerful motif. Davis’s artistry with the viola becomes a symbol of both his emotional escape and his self-expression. The author captures the transformative nature of music, using it to mirror Davis’s inner turmoil and his eventual path toward reconciliation.

Profoundly moving and beautifully written, this novel is a testament to the endurance of love in all its forms.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Too jumpy with the timeline and too much reliance on sex scenes to fill pages. Not a lot of plot and storyline or growth of character development. In the end, the characters just seemed selfish and concerned about their own feelings rather than their partner, and i no longer cared about them.

This book? Divine. I could not put it down—finished it in less than 24 hours. Such beautiful writing of such gorgeously complex and flawed characters. What a truly incredibly-told story.

awesome and well written novel about people working through their past and preparing for their future. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

At his wedding reception, Davis learns that his estranged father has died, throwing him and his new husband, Everett, into the chaos and uncertainty of trying to process the grief that comes with losing someone who hurt you. When the Harvest Comes had a lot of potential. It’s overall an intriguing story with, at times, some beautiful writing, but it just doesn’t manage to nail the execution. I think one of the weakest points is the dialogue, which almost never manages to feel natural and falls into the annoying trap of making characters explain everything via dialogue when it should maybe just be exposition. It’s also hurt by the number of perspectives in the book. It really needed to be trimmed so that the actual core of the story could be better explored. Other than Davis no character feels particularly fleshed out and even he could have used more development. None of the characters were really given the time they needed and if the story was intended to be more focused on Davis’s relationship with his father and the aftermath of his death, and his subsequent journey of self-discovery, that would have made sense, but instead the other characters were given almost equal time and it all felt overcrowded without giving their stories time to breathe. It’s also worth pointing out that the death of Davis’s father, which is referred to in the plot summary and is seemingly intended to be the driving force of the narrative, doesn’t actually happen until almost halfway through the book and it makes the pacing feel unnecessarily slow .

This was a beautifully written book about love, loss, family, and understanding who you are. I really loved this book and I recommend it as an emotional and heartfelt read.

3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 stars.

I was invested in the story, although sometimes the time frame changes took a little getting used to. No spoilers, but the last 15% went in a direction that I didn't expect, didn't necessarily agree with and were related to an incident that occurred earlier in the book that resulted in fisticuffs for being brought up. It didn't equate for me.

Nonetheless, I was appreciative of a story about sons and fathers and the differences in time and generation.

I received a complimentary copy of the novel from the publisher and NetGalley, and my review is being left freely.

This book offers a front-row seat to the intimate, often painful journey of two individuals wrestling with their past traumas, all while striving to build and nurture a complicated yet undeniably real relationship. At times, their actions may feel frustrating or perplexing—one moment, it seems like they're merely surviving, and the next, their behavior teeters on the edge of toxicity. There are moments of surprise, of bewilderment, and moments when you feel the rawness of their humanity. But this is life, isn't it? Messy, imperfect, and unpredictable.

The story unfolds as the delicate dance of two souls who, against all odds, found each other in the chaos of the world. They fight not just to be together but to understand and support one another despite the limited examples they've had of what love and connection can be. It’s easy to pass judgment from the outside, to critique decisions and reactions that don’t align with our own experiences, but how fair is it to judge when we have never walked in their shoes?

The final letter in this book broke something inside me. It moved me in ways I can’t fully articulate, leaving an ache in my heart that I know will linger long after the last page. This is a story that stays with you—one that demands you read with both an open mind and an open heart. It’s not just a book; it’s a quiet reminder of the fragile beauty in human connection, and it will hold a special place in my heart forever.