Very scattered review of Palaver by Brian Washington.

This book had many aspects I liked and only a few that I didn’t.

— The realness of the story.
The black and white photos in between the chapters — some blurry, and all of them giving the reader the sense that they are on the streets of Tokyo, with the son and the mother, visiting the places they’ve gone and seeing the things they’re seeing as they walk around.
The descriptions of the environment involving many senses — the music that is playing, the wind fluttering the son’s shirt, the people around them, some taking selfies and some clutching their child’s hand.
The mentioning of the names of the places they visit, the districts they walk to, and the stations they use to get there.
All of these things made me feel like I was reading something out of real life. Even though the summary of the book doesn’t mention anything about autobiographical elements, at first I felt like I was reading the story of the author himself, especially knowing the author was also going back and forth between Houston and Tokyo. The namelessness of the main characters didn’t bother me, but it didn’t help with the feeling that I was reading an autobiographical story. Questions like “Did the author really do that?” or “Am I reading about the author’s mother and their relationship?” or “Is this about them?” popped in my brain while reading the first few chapters of the book. It took me out of the story and makes me feel like I’m reading someone’s journal without their permission — which is a silly feeling to get from reading a book. I wanted to read the story as a singular item, but the nature of the story being so personal made me feel reluctant to get lost in it at first.
Anyway, it’s totally a me problem, and after a while — somewhere around the 30% mark — that feeling just went away, and the mother and the son became their own characters, with their names simply being “the son” and “the mother.” After that, I loved how real the story felt, how invested I became in reading about these two.

— The writing style. I will be reading other books from Brian Washington. His writing was captivating with beautiful prose sprinkled here and there. It wasn’t hard to follow most of the time even if there weren’t any quotation marks, and the flow between the son and the mother, the past and the present was very smooth. I really liked the words I was reading, the pacing, and the back-and-forth. I never got bored and always wanted to know what will happen in the next paragraph. I believe it is not easy to have a balance when telling a story such as this with multiple timelines and not lose the reader’s interest.

— The subtlety? I don’t like when books have too many things to handle in too few pages. This book is not that long and we see so many different issues. BUT the book handles them very well. I wasn’t expecting the subtlety and delicacy in each chapter. We read about characters with so many problems and struggles, yet they still come across as real people on the page — not just prototypes of the hardships they face. They continue living in their own way, with their complex lives. The messages or advice the characters offer to help and support each other don’t feel forced or didactic. It all feels real, and I think that’s hard to achieve in a book with so many layers of complexity.

— Details. When I say subtlety, I meant mostly the details that is spread all around the story. I think I would have liked the story more if I read it in couple of days, so that I could have catch these details more. The story doesn’t hold your hand and say ‘hey, I mentioned this beforehand, did you catch it?’ And I believe the beauty of this story lays in these little details.

— Community. AHHHHHH this story is ultimately very hopeful and uplifting.

— Other aspects I liked such as: Reading about the mother having her own journey. She wasn’t just a mother, but a person with her own story and life and struggles.
It was fun to get to know Tokyo through mother's eyes, and visit well-acquainted places with the son.
Walking around Tokyo made me want to visit there.

— Other aspects I didn’t like such as: I would have liked to read more about the son and his brother.

Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC!

I liked this book but wish I got more from it. Conflicting emotions, but I do think it’s good. The way characters are built was excellent, you find yourself really knowing these people despite the length of the book. The plot was very vague, and while I felt that was sometimes good for the message and tone, sometimes I needed more information and context. A lot is told through subtext but you get no facts, just the emotion from past incidents. I both liked and disliked that - hence the conflicting emotions.

Family Meal was the first book I read by Bryan Washington, and as soon as I finished it I read his two others and was so eager for more. I was so excited to receive an early copy of this book and I loved it just as much as his previous works. This book makes me wish there were more than 5 stars!

I loved the way this story unfolded, the skipping around in time, and following different characters. I loved filling in the backstory of the mother, while also getting to know the side characters more fully.

Bryan Washington's writing is so gorgeous and descriptive, I love the way he writes not only people but also settings.

Interspersed in the narrative are pictures of Japan and they are so lovely and really helped set the scene -- I was excited whenever I turned the (electronic) page to one, they were so beautiful.

As a mother of two young sons, the relationship between the mother and son in this book was really impactful -- made me think about what could happen in my own life to create such strain, but knowing that no matter what I would always drop everything to be there for my children.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes literary fiction and complicated family dynamics. I am so excited to read whatever Bryan Washington writes in the future!

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book!

palaver (noun) :
1. unnecessarily elaborate or complex procedure
2. an improvised conference between two groups, typically those without a shared language or culture

There couldn’t have been a better word to describe this story and I’ve come to wonder if it was built around the title.

Where do I even begin? Over the span of a few weeks where the mother and the son are together in Japan, we are told such a big part of their lives, it’s hard to pick a starting point.

Notice how I said « the mother » and « the son », no names, no other qualifiers? That’s how the main characters are referred to throughout the book and I have to say, I absolutely loved it. Some might hate it, but I felt like this was such a good addition to the story and the mother-son relationship. As I said before, we learn a lot about them as time passes, so much more than the fact that they are mother and son, because we learn about them as individuals, about the mother’s life before the son and the son’s life after he left, and what they do while both of them are in Japan. If they were real people, the first word we’d use to describe them would certainly not be their affiliation. Yet, no matter how much they have outside of each other, they are still the mother and the son. They will always be linked by these words.

There is one thing that bothered me in this book : the fact that we never actually see The Cause of the son’s departure. Or if we do and I just misunderstood, it wasn’t as impactful as it should have been. To me, it felt like we have the context and the aftermath but not The Cause. The catalyst for the son leaving and the two’s broken relationship should have been a big thing, in my opinion.

Still, this was such a realistic and raw story. The character development and the healing shown on page is beautiful. I love family who have issues that do the work and get better. Sometimes, it takes decades to be able to forgive and to apologise, and that’s okay.

The story unfolds in Tokyo, Japan. I have never been, but this book almost had me booking a flight. It is an ode to the city, punctuated by gorgeous pictures that make us even more immersed in the setting. They are much appreciated, although not necessary : the descriptions are more than enough to have us feeling like we’re already there.

The city is made all the more alive by the supporting characters who accompany the son and the mother in their journey. I loved every single one of them, with their stories and their love and their kindness. Chosen family will always make me go weak in the knees and the people from Alan’s bar are its very definition. Even the background characters are lovable : from the siblings of the slide to the lady who was smoking and not alright.

I read this book in one sitting, and I can’t wait for it to come out so I have an excuse to do it again.

Thank you for the ARC!

Unfortunately I couldn't send this version to my kindle but I have seen awesome reviews on thus book so I will be waiting for the say It'll come out so i can read but I am thankful for the opportunity to have this amazing work sent to me, all love and respect to the author

While this book was a little difficult to get into, I'm glad I stuck with it! This is a beautiful story about a mother and son and their journey back to each other.

This novel navigates between the nostalgia and the selfcare. A son and his mother, they do not have a very good relationship, they have a past and both of them were damaged, and carry their own luggage on their backs. Now that the son lives in Tokyo he's trying to found himself, and in a moment of weakness reach to his mom, but regrets it, now the mother travels to Tokio, to find out what is happening with his son but he's not expecting her.

This is the second Bryan Washington novel that I read, and overall I really enjoy how he builts the enviorement of the story, and how the characters gravitates between each other, The mother and the son have a very hard dynamic, that sometimes feels toxic, the comments and attitudes that are exchanged makes me anxious. It is a slow book, so don't expect a lot to happen.

At the end I enjoyed how The Son finds his found family in Tokyo and how he discovers more about himself and his mother and understand her more. The Mother for me was my favorite, because that even she knew how difficul it will be to recontruct his relationship with The Son she is persistent, and also how she found herself with this new connection with a new man.

if you're looking for a comfort but direct to the heart story this is the one.

I received an ARC through NetGalley for an honest review.

Unfortunately, this was a DNF @ 55% for me.

This was my first Washington and initially I was intrigued by the Mother and Son dynamic and just how Queer this novel is, but there was just something that just wasn't hitting for me or hooking me into the characters.

The story is told from the perspective of Mother and Son in the present in Japan and in the past in Jamaica and Canada for the Mother and America for the Son. It explores their difficult relationship and how their history effected them.

I can't tell if there's something a little hollow about the writing, whether I'm just hollow and autistic, or if the depersonalised nature of the characters, literally Mother and Son, and Washington's minimalist prose and punctuation that just didn't work for me.

There's a clear love for Japan in the writing and photos that are included. I just wish I could get more into the story, but it's just not for me.

I started this book at least five times…I could not get into it. It is very literature book clubby so that might be a better audience than than this kinda everyday fiction, true crime podcast enthusiast…all books have an intended audience.

I read this while traveling in Japan and felt Washington’s portrayal of Tokyo, and the complex mother-child relationship, was beautiful. Really grateful for the advance copy so I could read this while I was in the country. And I loved the photographs interspersed with the writing. This is the first book I’ve read by Washington… was drawn in by the location, but will look for his other novels.

“But it takes so long to build something, and no time at all to destroy it, you know?”

Palaver is about an unnamed son, living in Tokyo, who is unexpectedly visited by his estranged mother from the U.S., ten years after they last saw each other. Her arrival disrupts his carefully kept distance from the past, as he juggles a secret relationship with a married man and long nights at a local gay bar. While the son resists reconnection, his mother quietly begins building a life of her own in Japan, forming a tentative friendship with a neighborhood bistro owner. As they share space and memories, both are pushed to confront old wounds and consider what reconciliation might look like.

I’ll start by saying I enjoyed this, and a lot more than I expected to after starting it. Palaver is a slow, dual-POV character-driven story of quieter moments and delicate relationships evolving over time. As the story bounces between past and present for both characters, we’re drip-fed events in the past that led to the relationship being what it is today. I enjoy stories where the author respects the reader’s intelligence and leaves some dots for us to join ourselves. The relationship between mother and son is complicated and raw. Both have made mistakes, and both are frightened about the vulnerability needed to put them right. You find yourself routing for and against both characters at various points which make the wins in this story feel earned and meaningful.
I also enjoyed immersing myself in Japanese culture. I’ve never visited the country myself (yet!) but you can tell the author has a fondness and respect for the country and its people. I also loved the pictures of Japan interspersed among the story.

Palaver is also wonderfully and unashamedly queer - with all the colour and darkness that our community experiences. There’s a messy but honest authenticity to the gay experience the son lives through; and as a queer reader I found that hooked me in. I think readers, especially those in the LGBTQIA+ community, will connect with this story; alongside those who know what it’s like to feel lost, directionless and have complicated relationships with others. This won’t be a book for everyone, and I can imagine unless this book is FOR you, it won’t be to many tastes.

As a final aside - this is another books that doesn’t punctuate speech. While not a problem for me, I’m aware this is an immediate dealbreaker for some so one to be aware of.

Ultimately, this was an enjoyable book I found myself eager to return to between reading sessions. It hasn’t changed my life, and isn’t one I’ll likely reread, but was an enjoyable and engaging reading experience for the time I had it.

Thank you to FSG and NetGalley for this Advanced Reader Copy of Palaver by Bryan Washington - at the time of writing (May 2025) due for publication in November 2025.

Before my review, I would like to thank NetGalley and Farrah, Straus & Giroux for the ARC and the opportunity to read and review it before publishing.

I gave up on reading the book with my eyes at 57% of the way and then just used the audio feature to speed through the rest. My rating is 2.7 to 3 stars. However, this is a good book and would resonate with many people. I chose this book because of the cover and did not know anything about the author and his work; I liked the depiction of a distracted family dynamic, living life abroad, and being a gay man in a foreign country. It's an important story that should be discussed, and the book has a very creative storyline. However, the writing style didn't particularly work for me as it was hard to focus on understanding a clean and concise plot. Most of the time, the absence of quotation marks confused me about who was talking. I also felt that too many characters came and went, and I lost track of who was who. Sometimes, I found the side characters interesting but then found that they never came up again or were only there briefly to move the story along. I felt there wasn't any depth in character development between the Mother and Son, which I would have liked to see happen more fluently throughout the story. I felt as though this was telling the lives of the Son and Mother but not showing us the growth of this family throughout this book.

This one is bleak and bitter right off the bat. My first experience with Byan Washington and I can see how his narrative voice is very specifically Black and queer. It's unusual for me but I immediately felt more for the mother than the son, even though I know the place where the son's pained edge comes from. Their attempts to repair the relationship feels stilted and often bad faith and incidental. And yet there's something intentional about this happening in Japan, in a place where they're both in AND out of there element on multiple levels. Wouldn't say this was enjoyable or profound, but something about it felt essential to witness and understand. Perhaps I need to revisit this in audiobook form to hear the author's intended tone.

I honestly think this is such a beautiful story about two people who you'd expect to know each other so well who don't. Who are like strangers and yet they're not. They discover things they'd never known about the other while also realising that life keeps moving forward, things happen, people come and go and the right people really do find you when you least expect it. It's about family that you are born with and the family you choose. It's about changing perspectives. Effort to change those perspectives. It's resonated with me because of my own journey and I've truly loved every minute of this book!

This was truly a beautiful novel. Reading about the family dynamics and the relationship between the son and the mother carried me through such a range of emotions that I was so impressed with. Washington crafted a story that touches on so many facets of the human experience, from lighthearted and funny to nostalgic and traumatic. The way that queerness was highlighted here too was great, and the found family aspect combined with the biological family relationships paralleled so well.

This book follows the strained relationship between a mother and her son. It’s a slice-of-life kind of book about their dynamic in Japan (which I found insightful as someone who lives in Japan). I think this book had a lot of potential, and I did enjoy it, but a few things fell a little flat to me (personally).

What I liked:
☆ The writing style! While I can understand why someone may not like it, in terms of visuals and lack of actualised chapters, but it worked well for me. I particularly liked how the mother and the son were always referred to as just that.
☆ The insights into daily life and relationships.
☆ The photos of Japan! It really set the scene for me.
☆ Lots of beautiful and moving quotes/moments - “When I realized I’d watched the neighbors’ kids grow up”.

What I didn’t like so much:
☆ I think the struggles with mental health and queerness could have been explored even further.
☆ Lots of side characters, which is fine but I got confused often. I felt like we were expected to know who everyone was as soon as they were introduced, so maybe some more background for those side characters would have been nice.
☆ I did enjoy the cuts between the past and the present, however they came at quite random points and I think it got a bit confusing to keep up with at times (especially because there weren’t traditional ‘chapters’ in this book).
☆ I could probably have overlooked these other points I disliked. However, the NUMBER ONE THING that stopped me from giving this book a 4 star was how much cursing was in this book! It got to a point where it just became frustrating to read the word ‘fuck’ over and over again. During dialogue it was used fine, but it would have been nice to paraphrase at others points, so it didn’t feel overused.

Thank you so much for the ARC!

2.5/5
Really wanted to enjoy this based on the premise but sadly I found the characters hard to connect with. Some of the flashbacks to their past and interactions between characters gave them dimension, but unfortunately I just found myself waiting for the novel to end as I ended up not caring much about the emotional journeys these characters went on.
Thank you for the eARC Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Bryan Washington, and Netgalley.

Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for providing me this digital ARC to read and review, and thank you Bryan Washington for this touching story.

Palaver is story about an estranged family relationship between a mother and a son. The son moved away due to various problems, yet still called the mother when he was feeling at his lowest, causing the mother to make an impulsive trip to japan for two weeks.

This story is funny, touching, sad and bittersweet. It shows certain type of estrangement, where both parties don't understand each other and have definitely hurt each other, yet still yearn and want to care for one another, and I think this element is depicted quite well in this novel. The son is cold and distant towards the mother, but slowly warms up to her and even treats her to the sights of japan. The mother slowly tries to understand the son and his lifestyle, even giving him her approval.

What I think is interesting about this story structure, is that the mother and the son don't really interact that often in the book. We often see the mother in her individual ventures in japan, while the son is out partying in every queer bar imaginable. We meet a named cast of characters that both teach something to the main characters individually, allowing them the room to grow towards each other, and honestly I eat this up. The son finds what it means to be home and the mother finds what it means to be a mother. Both clearly deal with ghosts from the pasts based on the fragments of memories shown to us, which is then sometimes connected to the present story.

I think this story is sweet and realistic. I feel like there's still a lot of healing left between these two characters, but this was the first step.

Now as much as I love the story, the writing style wasn't for me. It was very fractured and confusing, which might make sense thematically, but it kept putting me out of the loop. Sometimes we would suddenly dive into a past memory, or we would swap povs in the middle of a chapter with no mention. It was also difficult to follow time-wise, especially when it comes to the son's pov, because some of his memory segments are not chronological. (maybe it is, but the Taku arc was quite confusing). For me personally, this writing kept putting me out of the flow.

All in all, it's a nice story. I did like it, 3.5 stars :)

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC!!

“Palaver” is a reflective and emotionally layered novel centered on Chris, the main narrator, and his found family in Tokyo. The unexpected arrival of his mother adds depth to the story, highlighting the tension and nuance of his relationship with his blood family. Told through dual POVs and a shifting timeline between past and present, the narrative explores identity, belonging, and the weight of personal history. While the pacing is uneven and slows in parts, Washington’s gift for crafting authentic, multifaceted characters remains evident. I especially appreciated the meditative tone of the story and its richly drawn Japanese setting.

Palaver by Bryan Washington is a beautifully written, emotionally rich exploration of connection, longing, and the complexity of human relationships. Washington’s prose is poetic yet accessible, weaving together personal stories with broader themes of identity, intimacy, and the spaces between us. Each page feels deeply personal, as if the characters are sharing their truths with you, making their struggles and joys all the more real. This is a compelling, thought-provoking read for anyone who enjoys character-driven narratives that speak to the heart.