APRIL 2026 READING

Bug Hollow: A Novel, by Michelle Huneven

published 2025, Penguin Press

288 pp,

ISBN 978-0593834879

Book Club Meeting:

April 28, 2026, 7:00 pm

Hosted by: Deb Fisher

Snack provided by: Tollie

Wine provided by: Linda LeVan/Patty Ard

Book selected by: Linda LeVan

Accessibility

Finger Lakes Library System

E-book

NY Public Library
Amazon (Kindle)

E-audio book

Amazon (Audible)

About the Author: Michelle Huneven

"Michelle Huneven was born and raised in Altadena, California. She received an MFA was the Iowa Writers Workshop and is the author of four novels.

Round Rock (Knopf 1997) and Jamesland (Knopf 2003), were both New York Times Notable Books and also finalists for the LA Times Book Award. Her third novel, Blame, (Sarah Crichton Books, FSG, 2009), was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the LA Times Book Award. Her fourth novel, Off Course, (Sarah Crichton Books, FSG, 2014), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Michelle has received a GE Younger Writers Award and a Whiting Award for Fiction. For many years her 'day job' was reviewing restaurants for the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly among other publications, for which she received a James Beard Award and several American Food Journalists Awards.

She has contributed essays and op-ed pieces to the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and various anthologies including Literary Pasadena, Dog Is My Co-Pilot, and Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed.

Michelle teaches creative writing to undergraduates at UCLA. She has also taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and served as a senior fiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Michelle lives in Altadena with her husband, environmental lawyer Jim Potter, along with a terrier, a black cat, and a talkative African Gray parrot."

SOURCE

Bug Hollow: A Novel

Kirkus Reviews:

"A deeply satisfying novel; Huneven's best work to date"

"After a tragedy, the fortunes of a California family unfold in unexpected ways.

It’s the mid-1970s when the curtain rises on architect Phil Samuelson, his schoolteacher wife, Sibyl, and their three children, Ellis, Katie, and Sally. Ellis, who will turn 18 that summer before college, heads off with a couple of friends for a week-long road trip but does not return on schedule, sending his parents only a few brief letters assuring them that he’s fine and begging them not to track him down.

As it turns out, Ellis dies so early in the book it seems no spoiler to say it, and his death will be quickly followed by another shock: He left behind a pregnant girlfriend.

With a structure reminiscent of Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth (2016), Huneven moves among her characters and over the next four decades to set up and spring all the surprises she has in store, occasionally leaving California to trace developments in spots as far-flung as Saudi Arabia and Oaxaca, and eventually requiring the services of 23andMe and the legalization of same-sex marriage to make all the many pieces fall into place.

As someone aptly describes the central couple, 'Oh, Phil’s lovely. His wife, though, is a prickly thing. But isn’t that always the case: the easygoing marry the prickles because who else would have them?' Yes, Phil is easier to love than Sibyl, and daughter Sally is quite a bit more appealing than her older sister, Katie, but Huneven is good at unlikable characters, making them fully three-dimensional while stopping far short of sappy redemption.

Another of her signature elements, alcoholism, is in the mix as well, appearing via a deep green tumbler of 'Hawaiian Punch' clutched in the hand of a major character and two cases of beer drunk daily by a pair of minor ones, retired civil servants and would-be swingers who run a donut shop in the middle of nowhere. Gotta love that."