So Old, So Young
2026
So Old, So Young follows six college friends (Mia, Marco, Richie, Adam, Nina, and Sasha) across roughly two decades and five milestone gatherings, from a New Year’s Eve party in their twenties to a fortieth birthday and, eventually, a funeral. Rather than tracking the day-to-day drift of the group, Ginder drops readers into these occasional reunions only, so each one lands with the weight of everything that’s changed in between: new jobs, new cities, marriages, children, and the widening gap between friends who are deep in family life and those still building careers or chasing independence.
The structure is the most interesting thing about this book, mimicking how adult friendships actually feel from the outside: familiar faces, unfamiliar lives. But I found myself wanting the novel to go deeper than it did. The gatherings capture small, sometimes trivial details well, but they skip over the connective tissue that would have helped me actually understand these six people rather than just their circumstances. Most of them come across as unhappy in one way or another, without quite enough development behind that unhappiness to make it land emotionally, and by the end I wasn’t sure what the book was building toward beyond fairly familiar ideas about being a better friend and owning your mistakes. I can see why this resonates so strongly with people who’ve lived the specific experience of watching college friendships fade under the weight of adult life, but that distance from the characters kept me from fully investing in it.
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