Soho
Published January 6, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Abby Rosso has bootstrapped her way from poverty and foster care to an advanced psychology degree and a tenuous position as a counselor at a private school on the North Shore of Chicago, where her son Benjamin has free tuition. She’s barely making ends meet, and it all starts to crumble when two girls are found dead and Benjamin becomes a focus of the investigation. Like many adolescents, Benjamin has become a moody, sarcastic, and mostly uncommunicative young man. But his problems aren’t simply with his single parent. He has few friends and feels like an outcast at a school where the other students can afford the clothes and travel that are out of reach for him. Abby has begun to see personality traits in her son that remind her of her estranged brother whose prison term keeps being extended thanks to his violent outbursts. Soon she discovers Benjamin was more involved with the dead girls than she had realized, and he has been secretly communicating with his toxic uncle. Can she protect her son? Can she trust him?
Abby gets some ambivalent help from her ex-boyfriend, a cop who took their breakup badly and has a habit of stalking her. She’s more relieved to reconnect with a college professor who served as a mentor during her university years. He’s no longer a practicing therapist, busy working on his second book titled What Boys Learn, but he agrees to meet with Benjamin for intensive counseling. Meanwhile, Abby is pushed out of her job because the school wants to show upset parents they are doing something by replacing their counselor. She’s desperately trying to manage her diminishing prospects while also being haunted by a time in her past when she was under the influence of her brother, following him into his darkness because she had no one else to rely on. While she has tried to protect Benjamin from his evil influence, she’s worried that she’s likewise flawed and may have passed the same flaws onto her son. Perhaps the question isn’t whether she can trust him, but whether she should.
This is a long, dense, simmering psychological thriller that bursts into action toward its end. It revisits some of the same themes as the author’s previous novel, The Deepest Lake (2024). How can parents know their children? What should they do when they seem to be flailing but don’t want help? How do figures outside the family influence the direction of children’s lives? And, in the case of boys today, what do they learn, and who do they learn from?
In addition to exploring the fraying bond between a mother and her son, Romano-Lax probes the problems facing boys growing up in a world where misogyny is making a resurgence. Interestingly, she doesn’t focus on the online world of the manosphere, but rather on human interactions that are shaped by the same social pressures. With her small cast of deeply-developed characters and an elusive central figure – Benjamin – who we only hear from directly toward the end of the book, she has put a fascinating spin on the difficulty of raising boys in a world where masculinity itself is in a state of flux.