- March 24, 2026
- Koehler Books
Evening Begins the Day
- A Featured Selection of the DearReader.com Book Club (with more than 375,000 members, including libraries, nationwide)
After she discovers her husband's infidelity, Rachel Cohen, reeling from hurt and shame, escapes to a rental house in the idyllic town of Woodbury, near Boston.
She winds up next door to her colleague Cynthia Meyers, who—unlike Rachel—seems to have everything in this town where parents are high achievers, children excel, and problems are sealed inside well-tended houses. Cynthia's a successful VP in corporate giving, who helped fund Rachel's latest environmental project for elementary kids. Cynthia's husband is a pioneering researcher in breakthrough cancer treatments. Their only child, Lauren, is set to graduate high school in the spring.
Pretenses shatter the day an ambulance pulls up in front of the Meyers's house and Rachel watches helplessly as Lauren is carried away on a stretcher. Amid their turmoil, Rachel and the Meyers' lives begin to intertwine. When they adopt an ancient spiritual practice called the Counting of the Omer, it leads them down unconventional pathways for answers.
Evening Begins the Day shines a light on the complexity of two families in crisis and their transformation from isolation to community, loneliness to hope and joy.
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"[An] affecting, hope-filled novel... Narrated with deep empathy and understanding for its multiperson cast, [it] troubles through contemporary ills with care, setting each in the context of Judaism's Passover story. And though the book's Jewish characters sometimes speak as if from outside of their tradition... the novel's overall push toward triumph—not through perfection, but through mutual acceptance—is gratifying. Two families come to counterintuitively freeing realizations about human fragility in... a heartening novel about self-forgiveness and community healing." Michelle Anne Schingler for Foreword
"What relevance do ancient Jewish rituals have in our modern lives? And can the frameworks of our ancestors repair our relationships to each other? These are the questions that punctuate Jessica Brilliant Keener's restrained and powerful new novel, Evening Begins the Day, which weaves two families' lives together as they contend with the ways in which their relationships have frayed at the edges and now threaten to unravel entirely." Joshua Geller Schwartz for the Jewish Book Council
"Evening Begins the Day takes us on a riveting journey of hurt and healing, questioning and hope. Jessica Keener has created a vibrant conversation between ancient Jewish practice and contemporary identity and family life." Elizabeth Graver, author of Kantika, winner of the National Jewish Book Award