I saw practically everyone on bookstagram raving about this novel and had to give it a try. I knew by the title alone that it would be moving and I’d probably love it.

THE PEOPLE WE KEEP follows a young songwriter named April in 1994. She’s on her own in the world and decides to live that way, hitting the road and vowing to never look back. We journey with her as she meets people who feel like home and change her life for the better.

The characters are what endeared this novel to me. April is a brave, lovable main character and I’d recommend this for her alone. Thank you to Gallery for my gifted copy!

April is a 16-year old living in a motorhome on her own after her mother left and her father prefers spending time with his girl friend and her child, essentially leaving April on her own.

April has big dreams of being a singer so she decides to steal a car and leave down, feeling like she has nothing left to lose. Along the way, she meets amazing people, discovers herself, and is able to achieve her dreams.

This was a great feel good, coming of age story.

When a young woman blames her unhappiness on everyone else, she lives with a shell around her. She'll never be the person she truly is as long as she remains in the rut she has dug for herself. But.....when she reaches that breaking point and leaves, taking a road to who knows where, she'll land in the mystical land of OZ, where everything she though she'd never have, is waiting for her.

I'm not usually someone who pays attention to Content Warnings, but the underage/adult relationship in this book threw me, and made me severely uncomfortable. I believe that was the point, but before I review this book I wanted to mention that.

Otherwise, I loved it. Top ten, probably. A keep on my shelf for a reread book.

Love, love, love this work! A tale about the family we make for ourselves and told by an aspiring artist. It is a great read.

DNF @ 52%. I just can’t do it. I really struggled with the age and immaturity of our narrator, and I questioned multiple times whether this should have been labeled as Young Adult. A summary of the first 100 pages: she dropped out of high school, ran away from home, got a job at a coffee shop in her new city, and slept in some random guy’s bed. Cool. As I kept reading, she developed a relationship with a man twice her age. It was so gross and really gave me the ick. I felt like I was reading April’s diary and not a fully formed novel. No. 🤢

This played out so beautifully in my mind, like a collection of Polaroid photos. I loved April and the people who loved her in all of their flawed grace. The ending felt a little too neat for me, but after everything April went through, she deserved it, right?

This book was on my shelf for a very long time, thanks to NetGalley for the ARC! It was a sweet read, but kind of redundant with the love and loss of the main character. I couldn’t decide if I loved her or not. In the end it was a wonderful wrap up of everything she had been through in her young life. The people she “kept” were all so wonderful to her. It reminds us to never take anyone for granted who loves you (no matter what)!

I gobbled this book down in two days. I couldn't tear myself away from this heartbreaking and bittersweet novel

(Spoiler!) Things didn't end like I wanted them to. And I don't know what happens next to these characters. But their stories are painfully beautiful. I loved seeing the characters grow.

You won't forget the family April has chosen - the people she keeps - in a hurry. Highly recommend!

Well this book pulled me in when on like page 2 it mentions my hometown! Seriously though, I loved this book even aside from
All of the hometown references!
April runs away from an unhappy home life in rural Western NY state as a teenager and ends up in Ithaca, NY. I too love Ithaca, and the picture the author paints of it in the mid-1990s felt like i really was there!
After finding a true friend and love in Ithaca she is forced to run again when the truth about who she is threatens to be revealed.
A few years pass and April is still a bit “lost”, getting by but sometimes finding herself in precarious or dangerous positions (especially with men). She finds another “found family” in Asheville, NC where is is safe but life ultimately brings her back to Ithaca where the story concludes. This is a story that will stay with me.

April is a young girl who has been left in an old broken down motor home to raise herself. Her Mother is gone and her father has a new family. Although she is young she is very resourceful. She makes friends with the people in a diner and begins to “work “ for her meals and a few dollars.
One day she finds an old guitar and begins learning to play. She has some memories of her father playing. After a few bad encounters she decides to “borrow “ a car and leave town.
This book is about the people she meets both good and bad and how they shape her life and give her the family she is seeking.

I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book had an amazing plot, but I felt the characters were a bit hard to connect to.

Thank you kindly to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for this review copy.

As soon as I finished this book, I went out and purchased it for three of my best friends because I just loved it so much. The writing was incredible and the plot was so interesting. I think we all want to find a Cafe Decadence, and I found myself thinking about it long after I finished reading.

Glad I went back to read this book after seeing a good review. It was worth reading. A bit sad, but well written. ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

I went into this thinking it was just about a girl leaving her hometown to pursue a music career but oh my god it was SO much more than that and truly exceeded all of my expectations. This is without a doubt one of my new all time favorites.

What I loved:
1. It was so easy to relate to/ feel for April. Even when I was upset with some of the choices she made, I understood why she reacted the way she did. She is only 16 when the story begins, so I had to take a step back and realize “wow this is a 16 year old in an unthinkable situation that is doing her absolute best”.
2. I am such a sucker for the found family trope and WOW did this deliver. I mean it is called The People We Keep, after all. Despite April’s poor coping mechanisms and her trauma response to flee, she finds people that love her no matter what and want to stick with her through anything. The relationships she forms are my absolute favorite part of this book.
3. Just this journey April goes on to find a place that feels like home after never feeling secure as a child was utterly heartbreaking and so, so beautiful
4. This book made me sob. And, yes I will shed a few tears when I read a book here and there, but it is rare that I full on sob like this book made me!!!

April Sawicki was abandoned by her mother when she was just six years old. From there, her life has only gotten worse to the point that, at sixteen years old, she is living in a seedy trailer park in a motorhome that doesn't even have an engine. Her emotionally absent father has also spent the past several months also being physically absent, living with another woman, Irene, and fathering her young son, while failing to even provide April with the basic necessities like food. She works part-time at the local diner owned by Margo, who is her friend and surrogate mother. Margo cares deeply for April and understands her father well, having dated him in high school and again after April's mother left. "Your father's a good man, April. He always means to be a good man," Margo explained when telling April that she was breaking up with her father, but not her. "He just . . . he gets in the way of himself, you know?" Margo and the diner give April a place where she can retreat, feel safe, and talk about life and her future. April is flunking her classes, but is completely enthralled with the old guitar her father gave her as a birthday present. She taught herself to paly and is and writing her own songs.

One night April finds the courage to hotwire her elderly neighbor's car and attend open mic night at the Blue Moon Cafe. She performs two of her original songs -- one about losing her virginity to her boyfriend, Matty, and another about her father ("Don't forget you made me. Don't forget you made me the way I am"). The audience loves her. She returns to the motorhome, curls up in the driver's seat to sleep . . . and fails her math test the next day. She decides to quit school and is offered a steady Friday night gig at the Blue Moon. But April discovers her father's secrets and they prove how little he cares about her. In a fit of anger, he breaks her guitar. After another argument, April has had enough. She steals her father's car and heads to Matty's house "one last time" with the knowledge that their discussions about marriage were not realistic. Because if she stays, she "will always be a body at rest" rather than the person she is meant to be. So with any possessions she figures will prove useful shoved into a garbage bag and thrown into the car, along with her mother's ring and a hundred and seventy-eight dollars saved from working at the diner, she drives on an interstate highway for the first time . . . with Little River and her little life there in her rearview mirror.

She sees a sign indicating that Ithaca is forty-one miles away. "I feel like the sign for Ithaca is fate or something close to it," April relates in the first-person narration Larkin employs to tell her story. She finds a dirty campground where she can spend the night, and in the morning walks into town. The Cafe Decadence has a "help wanted" sign in the window and the owner, Carly, hires her on the spot.

Thus begins April's journey to discover who she really is, what matters most to her, a place to belong, and people she can love and be loved by. Her first stop is Ithaca, but when her time there comes to a heart-wrenching end, even though it is the place where she makes her "first true friend," she hits the road again. Along the way, music sustains her spirit and feeds her soul, and she carves out a unique career as a singer-songwriter. She loves hearing her favorite sounds -- "“the click of the strap buckle against the guitar, pop of the mic as I switch it on, the way the strings of the guitar vibrate ever so slightly when I rest it on my leg.” She records and sells her CD's at the various venues where she performs and, over time, her music also "comes with its own chains. Leaves me pulled apart and spread too thin." It doesn't provide the freedom she dreamed about. Several times she lands in places where she thinks maybe she "could really fit" but when things do not work out, she resumes her nomadic life even as it "gets harder and harder to follow the road" and she decides she's "done with wanting what can't be mine."

But April presses on, despite loneliness, longing, and disappointment. She is a deeply sympathetic character, because her struggle is one that is universally understood and to which readers can readily relate. April's parents displayed the worst kind of callous disregard for her well-being. Her mother left her with her father who lacks the capacity to love and, worse, be present in his daughter's life. Rather than care for her, he gets involved with Irene, lavishing his attention on her son and fathers another child with her, leaving April to fend for herself in the motorless motorhome that has holes in the floorboard. April, with the unconditional support of Margo, figures out how to survive in Little River, but life there is too confining and finite for her. She summons the strength to escape, but, as she explains, she has never had a real friend or traveled, and she is unprepared for the challenges she encounters on her own. She is naive and she gets used, but she is a fast learner.

Larkin's choice to set the story in the 1990's -- a decade that seems, in retrospect, so much simpler and less complicated than today, in part because there was no social media -- and let April tell her story in her own words is highly effective. Larkin's straight-forward, unembellished writing style enhances the tale's emotional resonance. Because readers are privy to April's inner dialogue in which she voices all of her fears, insecurities, dreams, and desires, readers don't merely understand her journey. Rather, April embeds herself in reader's hearts at the very beginning of the story and continues residing there -- as she has lived in Larkin's consciousness since 2006 -- taking readers with her on her sojourn as she learns about what it means to really love another person ("It's easy to fall in love with someone hen you need them, but that doesn't make it real or right"), love herself, and be simultaneously self-reliant and able to make room in her life for others to love her. After great internal turmoil, April reconciles, in her own way, with her father, finally appreciative of and embracing Margo's wise explanation about his shortcomings. "It wasn't about me at all. He did what was easy. He didn't have it in him to do any better." She also figures out that she does not have to grow up to be like her parents, destined to make the same mistakes, but she can instead make different choices and conduct her life far differently. Ultimately, she learns how to let people love her and that those are the people she wants to keep in her life.

The People We Keep is a poignant coming-of-age story of one indomitable young woman who instinctually recognizes that her life is not meant to forever be limited and constrained by her circumstances. Rather, she summons her innate inner resources to explore the world and the people who inhabit it in a quest to find what makes her happy and fills her spirit up. Along the way, she learns painful, often heartbreaking truths about herself, the people she meets along the way, and how the world operates, as she searches for what her parents never gave her: a home and all it symbolizes. "A real place with a floor that isn't on wheels, where there aren't any lies left to catch up with me."

In The People We Keep, Larkin compassionately details April's examination of and quest for what and who matter to her life. She hopes April's story will serve as a reminder to readers to take a moment and "think about the people in their life who have been an enduring part of it in healthy and happy ways." Because for all of us, those are the people we keep.

Thank you for the chance to read this. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this-"watching" her meet each person, not knowing who they'd become to her, coming into her own- I'm here for all of it!

The People We Keep is a beautiful story about a young woman named April who perseveres despite troubled family relationships and a mountain of challenges that hold her from actualizing her musical dreams. As she navigates life, she meets people who see her for who she is, and not only make space for her (sometimes literally) but embrace her. And somewhere along the way, she sees that even if life sets you up with people you aren't sure you can trust, it may offer you a bounty of kindness and clarity and opportunities if only you are open to them.

This book was spectacular. It is rare, for me, to get to the end of a book and simultaneously yearn for more for a character, while still feeling like their storyline was perfectly wrapped up. I related to April in enough ways that I was fully invested in this book from start to finish.

A moving, poignant, and heartfelt story that follows runaway teen, April, as she escapes the heartbreak of her small town and finds her place in the world. Exploring themes of found family, self-acceptance, and belonging- this novel will surely make you emotional. I loved the character development and growth experienced, the moments of levity and music, and the overall message of hope that prevails over the course of the story. A beautiful novel!