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What people are saying about Small Wonder:

“Eileen Kelly’s Small Wonder is in no way small. It reminds me of the weight of Sue Miller’s arrival with The Good Mother and/or (y’know) Tolstoy. And to its pitch-perfect, realistic capture of urban domestic life in our time, it adds a dose of gaslighting drama that would put Les Diaboliques to shame. Like a magnet to the hand, eye and brain, good readers….”—Madison Smartt Bell, author of numerous books including Behind the Moon

“With insight and compassion, Eileen Kelly takes us into the horror of childhood and into the struggles of children masquerading as adults—which is to say, the struggles of adults. Small Wonder is clever and dark, humorous and harrowing. And it is hard to put down.”—Clifford Thompson, author of What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues and Twin of Blackness: A Memoir

“Eileen Kelly's Small Wonder is a sensuous and unnerving evocation of the world of young families—spilled milk and spurting tears, the biters and the bitten, potty jokes and potty mouths, stories at bedtime and terrors after lights-out. Into this hothouse of mothers and children, set in a pitch-perfect version of Brooklyn's Park Slope where child-rearing is a competitive sport, comes an attractive widower with secrets and an unerring eye for the community's most vulnerable, a precariously employed preschool teacher who really needs to make rent. Kelly's sweet-and-sour style had me hooked from the first page, and the novel's twisty plot does not disappoint.”—Diane Josefowicz, author of Ready, Set, Oh and L'Air du Temps

“With delicious wit and a keen eye, Eileen Kelly’s Small Wonder transports the reader to some of the most dangerous places in our modern world – classrooms, playgrounds, and the shifting sands of reality and madness, certainty and suspicion. How do we know who to trust when we can’t trust our own perceptions? Kelly’s rich detail exquisitely captures the joys and horrors of being children and raising children in a modern world where one false move, one moment of poor judgement, can alter our lives forever. This novel simmers with tension, and Kelly turns up the heat, with devastating results and satisfying consequences.”—Karen Lee Boren, author of Secret Waltz