How JoJo Got Her Mojo Back

King's real skill here is in the accumulation of small, specific detail that builds people rather than types. JoJo herself arrives fully assembled through her possessions and habits — the mug that reads "Fucking Mother of the Year," the dent in the kitchen table from a dropped barbell, the stickers still stuck to the table legs from when Denver was small. These aren't decorative; they're how the book tells you who this woman is and what she's lost. The dog, Furry, functions almost as a silent Greek chorus reading the room's tension, and it's a nice instinct not to overexplain her.

The standout material is the extended flashback with Frankie and the farm-supply store. It's a quiet, unglamorous scene — a boy stepping on a nail, a mother buying him proper boots and a hammer — but it does the work good characterization is supposed to do: it shows JoJo's parenting style (patient, watching for the tell before pressing), Frankie's particular kind of stubborn honesty, and the tenderness between them without a single line of sentimentality. The exchange "If I tell you not to go in the woods and play, are you going to go in the woods anyway?" earns its emotional payoff precisely because it doesn't announce itself as a Big Moment.

Abbey is drawn with real precision too — her impatience, her cherry-picked conversations, her inherited sharp tongue are all consistent and true to how a difficult daughter of a difficult marriage might actually behave. The prose around her isn't subtle, but the character is coherent and recognizable, which is the harder trick.