Her Kind by Sophie Lefens: A meditation on motherhood, friendship, and the refuge women create together

Sophie Lefens’s Her Kind is a beautiful, meditative novel about motherhood, friendship, grief, and the strange ways we prepare ourselves for loss. It is set on an almost dreamlike lakeside farm where a group of women create a temporary refuge from the rest of the world. This quietly immersive debut feels less like a story to race through than one to settle into, allowing its atmosphere and its questions about love and mortality to seep gradually into the reader’s thoughts. As someone who is frequently impatient with slow-moving novels, I found the writing here perfectly suited to the pace. The story moves slowly, but it never felt like it was dragging. Instead, the meditative quality of Lefens’s prose made me want to linger in this beautiful, strange world she created.

When Ada is left alone to raise her young son, Lenny, she retreats with him to her Aunt Leigh’s crumbling lakeside home. It is an extraordinary place to raise a child: surrounded by water, wildflowers, animals, and the rhythms of the natural world, with none of the constant negativity of Lenny’s father intruding on their lives. Ada has also managed to find part-time work that she enjoys and that allows her to spend a great deal of time with her son. There is an undeniable element of privilege in the life she has been able to build, particularly because so much of it depends on having an aunt like Leigh who can simply say, in effect, come live with me when everything falls apart. Not everyone has that kind of safety net.

Yet Ada cannot fully enjoy the peace she has found because she is convinced that her time with Lenny is limited. She has recurring visions of being pulled away from Earth and believes she is going to die, leaving her son without a mother. That fear prompts her to invite her three closest friends to Leigh’s home, initially for a week, but then eventually for a much longer stay. She feels a desperate need to decide which of these women might be able to raise Lenny if she is no longer there.

The premise could easily have turned the novel into a prolonged exercise in dread, but Lefens takes it somewhere much more contemplative. Once Ada’s friends arrive, the house becomes filled with women who each bring something different to the household. What begins as a visit stretches into months of cohabitation, creating an almost idyllic interlude in which friendship, creativity, motherhood, and communal living become possible in ways that the outside world rarely allows. The women support one another, care for Lenny, pursue their creative work, and begin to confront the wounds they have carried into adulthood.

Reading Her Kind felt a little like participating in a meditation. There is a stillness to the novel, even when the characters are dealing with difficult emotions and uncomfortable truths. The natural world is not merely a picturesque backdrop but an active presence throughout the story, and the farm becomes a place where the women can slow down enough to notice what they have been carrying. There is something deeply appealing about the idea of taking all your emotional baggage to a beautiful, isolated place and letting your closest friends help you wrestle with it until you are finally ready to put some of it down.

Of course, it is not always easy to live with the people we love. Lefens does not turn female friendship into a fantasy of perpetual harmony. These women have different personalities, needs, histories, and ways of responding to conflict, and putting them together in a confined space naturally creates tension. The disagreements never become melodramatic enough to destroy the friendships, though, and I appreciated that realism. The women can irritate one another without becoming enemies. They can disagree without turning every conflict into a referendum on the relationship itself.

That dynamic is particularly refreshing in a story so centered on women. Her Kind is set within what feels almost like a matriarchal utopia, where women are not dependent on men for their social or economic position. That allows the novel to imagine female relationships without the competition that is so often imposed upon them in real life. These women are not fighting over access to a man, status within a patriarchal system, or the limited opportunities available to them. They are simply trying to figure out how to live with one another, which creates space for a very different kind of story.

The characters nevertheless bring plenty of emotional baggage with them. Ada has been abandoned twice: first by her mother and later by her husband, who left while Lenny was still an infant. Leigh has always been the one dependable family member in her life, which makes Ada’s fear of losing her especially painful. At the same time, Ada is wary of allowing herself to love beyond the safety of her established circle. Her friend Peter’s feelings for her are apparent, but she is not ready to risk another devastating loss by allowing someone new into her life in that way. Her instinct is understandable. After being abandoned by the people who were supposed to stay, why would she willingly make herself vulnerable again?

Leigh’s own circumstances add another layer of uncertainty. Her memory is deteriorating, and the boundary between the present and the past has begun to dissolve for her. She sometimes behaves as though her late husband, Cal, is still alive, creating an unsettling sense that the house contains more than memories. Her nighttime visits to Cal’s grave and her increasingly mysterious behavior contribute to the novel’s supernatural atmosphere without overwhelming its emotional core. The mystical elements emerge gradually, as though they have always been part of the landscape and the reader simply needed to become attentive enough to notice them.

---

---

The deer that appear throughout the story are particularly significant. In Celtic lore, deer can serve as messengers between the physical world and the spiritual Otherworld, while stags are associated with leadership and self-discovery. Those associations fit Her Kind remarkably well. Ada and the other women are all undergoing some form of transformation, whether they are confronting motherhood, grief, abandonment, aging, love, or their own understanding of themselves. The deer seem to belong simultaneously to the ordinary natural world and to something beyond it, reinforcing the novel’s sense that the boundaries between life and death, past and present, and physical and spiritual existence are not always as firm as we imagine.

Then there is the wolf, which is mentioned but never seen. Leigh says it is coming soon, and given everything happening around her, it is difficult not to read that animal as a symbol of the death she senses approaching. The wolf becomes part of the novel’s language of anticipation: something is coming. Everyone seems to know it, but no one can prevent it.

That feeling of anticipation runs through much of the novel. Ada is constantly waiting for death, but the reader also begins to sense that the entire period at Leigh’s home is temporary. This group of women has somehow stumbled into a beautiful, peaceful, creatively productive interlude, and there is an almost palpable desire to freeze it in place. They would happily remain there forever, surrounded by the lake, the farm, the child, their work, and one another. But life does not allow us to preserve our happiest moments simply because we have finally found them.

That is perhaps what makes the novel’s meditation on motherhood so affecting. Ada’s concern is not simply that she might die. She is terrified of what happens to the person she loves most if she does. Her friends’ presence gives her a way to contemplate that possibility, but it also forces her to confront the fact that no parent can completely protect a child from loss. Even the most loving community cannot make mortality disappear.

What Her Kind ultimately offers is not an escape from that reality but a vision of how people might face it together. The women cannot prevent loss, and they cannot repair one another completely. What they can do is create a place where healing becomes possible. They can care for one another, challenge one another, make room for one another’s grief, and provide the kind of support that makes carrying an unbearable thing a little easier.

There is something quietly radical about that vision. The novel does not need its women to be flawless or endlessly harmonious. They are allowed to get on each other’s nerves, to make mistakes, to carry old wounds, and to be uncertain about what comes next. What matters is that they remain willing to show up for one another. In Her Kind, friendship is not merely a pleasant addition to life. It is one of the things that makes life survivable.

For all its supernatural elements, Her Kind is ultimately grounded in very human questions. How do we prepare the people we love for a world without us? How do we learn to trust again after abandonment? How much of ourselves can we give to other people without losing our sense of who we are? And what happens when the place that has sheltered us can no longer protect us from change?

Lefens approaches those questions with prose that is atmospheric without becoming opaque and a story that allows its mysteries to unfold at their own pace. The result is a novel that feels less interested in delivering easy answers than in creating a space where readers can sit with difficult questions. Like Ada and her friends at Leigh’s farm, we are given a temporary refuge, a chance to slow down and consider what we owe one another and what it means to love someone when we know that eventually, inevitably, we will lose them.

Her Kind is a beautiful debut for readers who enjoy literary fiction with a touch of the mystical, particularly stories that place women’s friendships and experiences at the center. It is a book about making a home, finding a family, and learning that even the most peaceful seasons of our lives cannot last forever. Sometimes, though, the fact that they are temporary is precisely what makes them worth inhabiting fully.

Have you ever read a book that made you want to move into its setting and stay there for a while? I’d love to hear your thoughts on Her Kind and the kind of refuge its characters create in the comments.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Join the conversation

If you love books that stay with you—and enjoy thinking about them long after you’ve turned the final page—subscribe to get new literary analyses and writing tips from Write on the World!

Related Content

• The Strangers by Naomi Alderman: Grief, strange creatures, and a world that keeps moving (Write on the World)
• Body Language by Meg Howrey explores the complicated choices of family, autonomy, and Alzheimer’s (Write on the World)
• Good Morning Means I Love You by Kendra Allen: A powerful novel about family, freedom, and choosing your own life (Write on the World)
• 3 Tips for writing literary fiction that doesn’t drag (Unsolicited Manuscript)

Now available in print and on Kindle!

Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

For fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Push, and Baby Teeth.