In Fairbrother's perceptive debut, a young journalist is left reeling and looking for answers after her father's sudden death. Ellie Adler, 24, a reporter at a D.C. news website, heads home to Maryland to visit her poet father, James, and her stepfamily. Ellie, the oldest, is happy believing she's her father's closest confidante and shares his writerly interests. Days later, he dies of a heart attack, and a bereft Ellie reads his most famous poem, "The Catch," at his funeral service, where an unknown woman attends. Later, Ellie begins looking into the woman's relationship with James, and tries to piece together why he bequeathed Ellie an unfamiliar tie rack and gave the lucky baseball she'd always wanted to a stranger named L.M. Taylor. Meanwhile, Ellie begins questioning her relationship with her boyfriend, an older, married man, after her roommate learns of the affair. She also parlays a work assignment into an investigation of Taylor's osprey conservation on the Chesapeake Bay to learn more about him. The minutiae of James's estate eventually wears thin, but Fairbrother ably captures Ellie's fractured world as a child of divorce, which fuels her motivation. This is a promising start. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME. (June)Correction: A previous version of this review mischaracterized a plot point.

Fresh out of college and happy with her job, her friends, and her lover, Ellie Adler is undone by the unexpected death of her father--not least because he leaves her an embarrassingly insignificant bequest while willing a baseball they both loved and valued to a stranger. Now Ellie is on a hunt to find out why. Fairbrother has interesting credentials: she's an associate editor at Riverhead Books and the granddaughter of E.L. Doctorow.

Ellie's beguiling, charismatic father may have had four children with three different women, but Ellie came first, literally and in his heart, too. When his perplexing bequest indicates otherwise, the 20-something reporter will use--and misuse--all her skills to uncover the truth. It's 2012, and 24-year-old Eleanor Adler is living her post-college, first-real-job best life. She's in Washington, D.C., sharing a shambolic group home with roommates who clerk for federal judges and work at embassies and B-list agencies. She's a junior reporter for Apogee, a news startup that exists to get clicks and save journalism. She's seeing Lucas, a married 39-year-old think tanker, who takes her on dates to the Union Station food court and Maryland suburbs where they won't be seen. Ellie's hashtag-adulting takes a sudden and sad grown-up turn when her father unexpectedly drops dead in his Chesapeake Bay home. Although not exactly well-off, he was careful with his legacy, leaving each family member--third wife Colette; their son, Van; second-marriage daughters Sadie and Anna--a meaningful totem of his love. Except Ellie, who got a plastic gingerbread-man tie rack. It's 100% true that said plastic tie rack is a rather flimsy MacGuffin on which to hang a plot, and the central-casting characters (size 12 Ellie doesn't fit in and loves reading; attractive herbalist Colette visits a shaman) aren't exactly compelling. It's also true that they're good enough company, especially when punctuated by sharp, spot-on observations of journalism ("They can comment after we publish") and Washington life ("Sometimes it seemed as if people in their mid-twenties did all the work in D.C."), informed by the author's own decade reporting in the capital. Sure, go ahead and pack this for your next long weekend--it's fun! That said, it doesn't really need to make the trip home. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Journalist Eleanor Adler's life is upended when her father dies suddenly of a heart attack. With four children by three different mothers, James Adler's attention had always been divided. But as the oldest, Ellie always had a special bond with him. Ellie expects to inherit James' most treasured possession, a baseball that inspired him as he wrote poetry, but is shocked when she finds it's been left to a person she doesn't know. As Ellie searches for the mysterious L.M. Taylor, she also grapples with her emotions over her torrid affair with an older, married man. Fairbrother's debut is characterized by its elegant yet comfortable prose--readers will feel at home with Ellie as if experiencing the story's events along with her. The mystery drives the plot, but Ellie's personal growth is the heart of the novel. Her journey is braided in with her new knowledge of her father, and her father's past impacts hers as she learns who she truly is. This layered coming-of-age story will appeal to fans of Jennifer E. Smith's The Unsinkable Greta James (2022).