Joyce has been divorced for a year now. She enjoys her remote work and the Cambridge neighborhood she’s been living in for most of her life. Without worrying about new romance or grown-up kids, Joyce has a new hobby to keep her happy --- trolling the local social networking site Small World. Here she has access to all the small details about life that she needs, and she rewrites some of her favorite posts to satisfy what little creative writing urge she has.

Out of the blue, Joyce’s estranged sister, Lydia, calls and says she is moving back East. Joyce, thinking it will be fun, invites her to move in with her. However, they aren’t aware that what they don’t know about each other will put a serious dent in Joyce’s “small world.”

"Laura Zigman writes easy-to-read novels with intelligent protagonists making bad emotional choices. SMALL WORLD is no exception.... [The book] takes entertaining and surprising turns as the sisters march forward, like all of us, into uncertain times."

As children, Joyce and Lydia were overwhelmed by their middle sister Eleanor’s needs --- a wheelchair and special teachers --- and their mother demanded that she be given the family’s attention at all times. Eleanor was eventually institutionalized, and her death at 10 left a painful imprint on each member of the family. Now, with their parents gone as well, Joyce and Lydia only have each other. But there are resentments and wounds that may be too deep to heal.

Still, the sisters find a common enemy --- a couple who moves upstairs and creates a wellness center. As their clients clomp and laugh and jump about the center, Joyce and Lydia make plans to take these noxious neighbors to task, culminating in a Halloween prank that goes too far. This eventually brings them to a standoff, releasing their bitterness and anger towards each other while also reminding them that one can’t run away from family, no matter how hard one tries.

Laura Zigman writes easy-to-read novels with intelligent protagonists making bad emotional choices. SMALL WORLD is no exception. However, she seems to have given in to the claustrophobia of our world’s lockdown, where we were left with family members in our own little cocoons, and our neighborhoods now seemed as big a world as we would ever see again. The sisters try to understand each other and their pasts, both individual and collective, as they share a space for the first time in many years.

Although COVID plays no role in the story, it isn’t hard to see how neighborhood text chains become a lifeline for Joyce. Those small stories about lost dogs and who owns the sidewalk reminds us of how we’ve all been forced to focus so carefully on the minutiae, the mundane --- the moment --- for so long.

The novel sets out to give its protagonist a chance to reconvene and rebalance a life that has felt overwhelming at best. Carefully choosing words and actions, Joyce begins to see how to let the fostering damage of 40-something years go, replacing it with a sense that memories have no place in the present world --- they are a luxury that can be set aside, just like her notebooks filled with her poetry about the locals. Although their mother, consumed with guilt over Eleanor’s needs, literally destroyed their family with a focus that shut everything else out, Joyce and Lydia now have the chance to make a choice and stay together, moving forward from a new place of understanding and love. Do they do it? Will it last?

SMALL WORLD takes entertaining and surprising turns as the sisters march forward, like all of us, into uncertain times.