Tina is a 30-year-old preschool teacher and the single mom of ten-year-old Matty. She finds herself economically challenged, especially as a resident of Park Slope, Brooklyn, a neighborhood of multi-million-dollar brownstones and Prada-toting moms.

More than that, she feels stuck. Every day she takes her morning run, goes to work, looks after her friend/neighbor/landlady’s girl, has a few glasses of wine, and, well, that’s about it.

Enter a new student in Tina’s preschool class, Jonah. He and his ten-year-old sister have just moved with their father Patrick from Colorado, trying to leave behind painful and muddled memories of their mother’s sudden death.

The kids become (sort-of) friends. And Tina and Patrick…well, she can imagine seeing where this can go.

After all, he’s an attractive man who endears himself to nearly everyone he meets, and he’s available and interested. Meanwhile, both Tina’s housing and her employment are increasingly precarious, and change may be coming whether she’s ready or not.

Jonah and his sister are behaving badly, putting Tina’s classroom and the friendships under stress. But what about Patrick? Maybe something will work out there, a big, happy blended family perhaps if she ignores the sea of waving red flags…What people are saying:"Eileen Kelly’s Small Wonder is in no way small.

It reminds me of the weight of Sue Miller’s arrival with The Good Mother and/or (y’know) Tolstoy. And to its pitch-perfect, realistic capture of urban domestic life in our time, it adds a dose of gaslighting drama that would put Les Diaboliques to shame.

Like a magnet to the hand, eye and brain, good readers. .

. "—Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising, finalist for the National Book Award“Eileen Kelly's Small Wonder is a sensuous and unnerving evocation of the world of young families—spilled milk and spurting tears, the biters and the bitten, potty jokes and potty mouths, stories at bedtime and terrors after lights-out.

Into this hothouse of mothers and children, set in a pitch-perfect version of Brooklyn's Park Slope where child-rearing is a competitive sport, comes an attractive widower with secrets and an unerring eye for the community's most vulnerable, a precariously employed preschool teacher who really needs to make rent. Kelly's sweet-and-sour style had me hooked from the first page, and the novel's twisty plot does not disappoint.

”—Diane Josefowicz, author of Ready, Set, Oh and L'Air du Temps“With delicious wit and a keen eye, Eileen Kelly’s Small Wonder transports the reader to some of the most dangerous places in our modern world – classrooms, playgrounds, and the shifting sands of reality and madness, certainty and suspicion. How do we know who to trust when we can’t trust our own perceptions? Kelly’s rich detail exquisitely captures the joys and horrors of being children and raising children in a modern world where one false move, one moment of poor judgement, can alter our lives forever.

This novel simmers with tension, and Kelly turns up the heat, with devastating results and satisfying consequences. ”—Karen Lee Boren, author of Secret Waltz.