Maybe We’re All Homewreckers | Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum Review

“In the beginning, everything felt dark and big. Lonely and serious. But as time went on, everything grew lighter and smaller, less alone. It was a love story.” – Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum

---

This was such a weird, beautiful, strangely comforting, and alarmingly human story about grief, nostalgia, envy, art, young love, and the ghosts we carry long after we think we’ve moved on.

And I absolutely loved every single moment.

I went into Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum expecting a bizarre, maybe even spooky story about a woman moving back in with her ex-boyfriend and his fiancée. Honestly, what’s scarier than that?

But then what I got was something so much more layered. I wouldn’t be surprised if Homewrecker eventually finds its way into the weird girl lit genre, because it has exactly the kind of strange, atmospheric, emotionally messy female energy I love.

This post could contain affiliate links, which means I would receive a small commission at no cost to you should you shop using the links.

Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum Synopsis

Piper thought she had moved on from her ex Aaron, who ghosted her three years ago. But when he invites her to move into the home he shares with his fiancée, Victoria, old feelings quickly resurface.

Then Piper discovers that the house has a ghost of its own. As her past begins to blur with her present, Piper must confront her grief and the life she has been trying so desperately to reclaim.

Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum Review

I did not go into this book expecting to absolutely love it the way I did.

The hardest part of writing this review was deciding what to focus on without turning it into a ten-page thesis. So, instead, I’m going to highlight a few of the things I thought Homewrecker did especially well. With Taylor Swift lyrics… (sorry, not sorry at all)

Full spoilers ahead!

Nostalgia is a Mind’s Trick

I think one of the things Homewrecker understands so well is that sometimes you’re not actually trying to get the person back. You’re trying to get back to the life and the future uou thought you were going to have.

Piper’s relationship with Aaron, albeit so frustrating, was one of my favorite parts of this book because it felt painfully human. She loved him when they were young, and even though their relationship ended really badly, there is something incredibly easy and comforting about falling back into someone who once knew and loved you.

“There was comfort in the nostalgia… but it was also unsettling, to see how time had distorted everything, how memory was a fun-house mirror.”

Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum

But Piper slowly realizes that the memories of the past are real, but time has distorted what they mean. Nostalgia can make something feel so familiar that we mistake familiarity for truth.

Piper remembers the version of Aaron who made her feel seen. But the book eventually shows us that Aaron’s entire problem is that he never ever actually saw just Piper in the first place.

Use My Best Colors For Your Portrait

Piper saw Aaron in a way that he never ever seemed capable of seeing her (or anyone else for that matter). Piper truly studied him, admired him, understood all of his expressions, noticed all of his quirks and moods.

“I had drawn his face so many times—that I could read his expressions the way a poet reads a poem, summoning the subtext to the surface, pulling up the network of twisting gnarled roots where another person might have seen only a single, unimpressive green shoot.”

Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum

Aaron, meanwhile, never seemed interested in painting Piper’s portrait. He kept painting the whole damn room.

Like when he first meets Piper in an art class, everyone is supposed to draw her, the model. Aaron literally draws the whole room instead of just Piper. Which at first, you could be like: he’s romantic or artistic or he sees something bigger than everyone else! But no. He wanted the whole room.

Even later, with the ridiculous video game he creates it has a “true love” that is essentially a combination of all the women in his life.

It becomes such an effective way of showing us who Aaron really is. He keeps everyone in this confused orbit, wanting everything without accepting the consequences.

I truly loved to hate him.

This pain wouldn’t be for evermore

The cover gives us one lonely wasp, and at first I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to make of it and assumed there would be a some type of infestation (maybe wasps would be the true homewrecker). But once I noticed just how deliberately the wasps appeared throughout the story, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

They first appear in Jonah’s room as a pair, with a nest hidden in his closet that Piper sees but their mother suggested it be left as is.

“If there’s wasps, there’s wasps. Let them be.”

Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum

Piper carries the thought of the wasps with her while she lives with Aaron and Victoria. They appear in the language she uses to describe the way people dance at a party. They become part of her thoughts about her mother’s grief. And eventually, when her mother is actually doing better, we learn that the wasp nest has been removed.

The wasps became another kind of ghost to me. Something left buzzing beneath the surface of everything else going on because no one is ready to truly acknowledge it or disturb it. Their nest can be removed. Even a sting eventually stops hurting. The pain doesn’t have to be forever.

And that is what Homewrecker does so beautifully with grief.

If you live like that, you live with ghosts

Piper isn’t only haunted by a literal ghost (we love you, Marilyn). She has already been haunted by Aaron, by Jonah, by her family, by the person she used to be, and by the future she thought she would always have.

She’s been living with ghosts all her life, and I think the book is truly asking: if you choose to keep living like that, how much of your life are you missing out on?

“In this way, the past three years had been one long musical remider of Aaron, his ghost haunting me every time I ran an errand.”

Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum

Piper slowly begins to understand how much of her actual life she has missed out on while trying to return to a life that no longer exists.

I especially loved the way Piper’s feelings toward Bea and Victoria evolve. The book doesn’t just gloss over jealousy or pretend it’s an emotion we can simply decide not to have. Instead, it asks what happens when we can be honest about it.

“Or maybe I did hate them, but it wasn’t the loudest emotion, and so I never really heard it the way I heard my longing, which was constant and clear.”

Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum

Sometimes the person we envy isn’t someone we should hate, simply because they have something we wish we had.

And maybe that is just another kind of ghost have have to learn to let go of.

To live for the hope of it all

The art throughout the book was another element I absolutely loved. Art becomes a way the characters understand themselves and each other, but also a way they try to control how they are seen by others.

Art is used to seduce, to manipulate, to preserve, and to rewrite.

Aaron’s drawing of Piper is one of the first things that brings them together, the murals become a way to define who gets to define a home, and Piper’s connection to Christina’s World becomes a this physical reflection of her own tendency to keep reaching toward something she can’t return to.

“It had always seemed quietly hopeless, like she was trying to return to a place she could never quite reach.”

Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum

And then there’s Aaron’s secret art room for Piper, tucked away in the basement behind a crawl space (so damn romantic…). He paints it with polka dots that Piper describes as “a love story.” I think the room was just a way of shaping Piper’s perception of their relationship.

But maybe that is the beautiful danger of art… it can show us the truth, but it can also make us believe in a version of something that isn’t true at all…

I can’t stop you putting roots in my dreamland

So, who is the homewrecker in Homewrecker? I couldn’t stop thinking about the title throughout the entire book. At first, Homewrecker seemed so obvious. Piper is moving into the home of her ex and his fiancée. She’s the homewrecker, right?

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this book is absolutely littered with homewreckers.

“It should be illegal, to build a dream in someone else’s head and then renege on it.”

Homewrecker by Becky Mandelbaum

Piper, obviously. Aaron, who repeatedly destroys relationships through his infidelity. Victoria, who literally paints over the murals that once gave the house its character. Piper’s father, who leaves and initiates the collapse of his family. Jonah, whose death permanently changes the home Piper and her mother live in. Even Kitty, the original owner of the house, could be seen as a homewrecker from Victoria’s perspective because she covered the walls in murals that Victoria wanted to erase.

Maybe there isn’t one person who wrecks a home. Maybe we are all home wreckers at some point in someone else’s story.

Everything You Lose Is a Step You Take

If it isn’t already VERY obvious, I loved this book.

Becky Mandelbaum’s writing is beautifully descriptive, atmospheric, strange, funny, and emotionally sharp (like a wasp sting). I never felt like the story lost momentum, I was completely absorbed from beginning to end.

This book is weird, sad, funny, uncomfortable in some parts and deeply comforting in others. It has ghosts and art and complicated women and a truly impressive number of really, really terrible decisions.

More than anything, though, I think Homewrecker is a story about the difficult yet important reminder that sometimes loss becomes movement. That letting go doesn’t mean something didn’t matter to us. That we can love what we once had without spending the rest of our lives trying to get back there, chasing a ghost.

Sometimes everything you lose really is a step you take.

And I loved every step of this strange, heartbreakingly beautiful story.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Thank you so much NetGalley and the publisher Spiegel & Grau for this ARC!

Publication date: June 1, 2027