ORDINARY LOVE is a breathtaking book about self-discovery and second chances that Emily St. John Mandel calls, “A beautifully written, intelligent, quietly hopeful story about being lost and found.”
Marie has called Ordinary Love an adult coming-of-age novel because, “we talk about coming of age as if it’s something that happens only once, when we are young and then become adults, but I think we know that we come of age many times in adult life, too.”
Read an excerpt from the novel below!
The earth was full of stones but she liked prying them out of the ground. Emily’s gardening knife scraped their edges. Some stones were flat and could be added to the rock wall bordering the property; others had set their long, sharp teeth deep into the dirt. She wiggled rocks out of place but stopped when she heard the distant splash of the children.
Their voices were happy. She didn’t want to overreact. Jack said she always overreacted. She stifled the instinct to go around the house to the backyard and scold the children for swimming without an adult present. She didn’t want to be an oppressive mother. They were good swimmers. If they needed her, she was close by. It’s crazy, Jack often said, the way parents constantly monitor their kids. It wasn’t like this a generation ago. Let them play.
They had tolerated the traffic on the drive upstate, had tolerated Jack waking them early on a Saturday. He had carried them down the staircase of their Upper East Side townhouse, one sleepy child in each arm. Stella’s dreaming mouth was open as she rested her strawberry-blond head on Jack’s shoulder. Connor was too big, really, to be carried, his long, thin legs knocking loosely against Jack’s strong ones as the trio descended the stairs. Jack’s smile was contented and proud, as though this moment with his children in his arms was a long hike with a vista at its end. “You can eat breakfast in the car,” he had told them, “and jump right into the pool when we get there. This might be the last warm day of fall, so let’s enjoy it.” Connor and Stella had flung themselves from the car, slammed through the pool gate, and jumped off the diving board. Emily’s dive was a clean slice. Jack chose not to swim. He went into the guesthouse, crowbar in hand.
That was hours ago. Emily set a daffodil bulb into the pocket left in the ground by a rock, pushed dirt into the cavity, and straightened. The splashing on the far side of the main house grew louder. Earlier, Connor and Stella had gone inside, teeth chattering, to change into last year’s Halloween costumes: a pirate for Connor and a pink cat for Stella. Now, though, they called to each other over the slap and scatter of water.
Unable to ignore her unease, Emily set down the gardening knife and stepped out from under the maple. She walked toward the backyard. A bird sang. Her pace quickened.
No one had wanted to go upstate except for Jack. He had work to do, he said. There was a leak in the roof of the guesthouse: a yellow stain on the ceiling. Last weekend Jack had broken into the drywall to find dead chipmunks that had eaten through the fluffy pink insulation and clawed the studs. He removed their carcasses from the holes he had made and took photos of their brown husks, their big teeth. He made the children come look and placed a skeleton into Connor’s open hand. “See what they did to our house?”
“Not our house,” Connor said. “The guesthouse.”
“I’m going to get them,” Jack said. “Every last one.”
“Bad guests!” said Stella.
“Exactly.” Jack boosted Stella so that she could peer into the ceiling’s hole, insulation pulled from its gut like intestine. “Bad guests!”
“We could hire someone,” Emily said, not hopeful. When Jack began a project he finished it.
“Why, when I can do it myself? Or do you think I can’t?”
He worked on the guest house while the others swam until the children grew bored and hungry and left the pool to eat hot dogs in front of the TV in their costumes. She had thought that was where they were, watching cartoons while she gardened. She had thought that she’d locked the pool gate, but she must not have. Connor and Stella shouted, then only Stella, whose shout became a word that changed Emily’s worry into fear: “Mommy! Mommy!”
Emily ran across the grass.
The children barreled into her before she turned the corner of the house. She clutched them. Stella’s cat suit was dry, but Connor was soaked, his brown pirate’s jacket now black and heavy with water.
“Are you okay?” she said. “What’s wrong? Connor, why did you swim in your costume?”
“He didn’t!” Stella said.
“Daddy threw me into the pool,” Connor said.
“What?”
Connor’s wet eyelashes were black and spiky. His spindly body, tall for ten years old– he was in the ninety-seventh percentile for height, tall like his father– was shaking. He coughed, then couldn’t stop coughing, even when Emily rubbed his wet back. Finally, voice thin, Connor repeated, “He threw me into the pool.”
The air was quiet. Emily noticed, as she should have noticed before, that no thumping or clattering came from the guesthouse. “He was playing with you?”
“No,” Connor said.
“No,” Stella said, more firmly.
Excerpted from Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski, published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Marie Rutkoski. Ordinary Love comes out June 10th, 2025. Pre-order a copy here
MARIE RUTKOSKI is New York Times bestselling author of books for children and young adults, including The Shadow Society and the Kronos Chronicles, which includes The Cabinet of Wonders. She published her first novel for adults, Real Easy, in 2022. Rutkoski is a professor of English literature at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
