Magnolia Parks- — The Long Way Home

Let’s address the elephant in the room: BJ and Magnolia are toxic. They cheat. They lie. They use other human beings as pawns in their emotional chess game. In any other novel, you would scream, “Get therapy!”

Simultaneously, BJ is drowning in the consequences of his choices. His marriage is a gilded cage. He watches Magnolia move through tabloids with a parade of safe, handsome, wrong men, and his internal monologue becomes a masterclass in romantic masochism.

Read if you love: Taylor Swift’s The Great War , champagne hangovers, the ‘will they/won’t they’ that lasts a decade, and characters who make terrible decisions with impeccable lip liner. Magnolia Parks- The Long Way Home

Following the cataclysmic ending of Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark , fans were left hyperventilating. BJ is married to someone else (the beautiful, quiet Beatrice). Magnolia is shattered in a way that even a Birkin bag full of Xanax cannot fix. The Long Way Home picks up the glittering, jagged pieces.

The book alternates between London’s gritty underbelly (where the Parks and Ballentine family drama threatens to turn genuinely violent) and the champagne-soaked ballrooms of the elite. Hastings forces them to orbit each other, closer and closer, until the gravitational pull becomes unbearable. Let’s address the elephant in the room: BJ

The Long Way Home is the longest book in the series, and at times, you feel every single page of the heartache. The middle section drags slightly as Magnolia explores a “healthy” relationship that feels as exciting as beige wallpaper.

But Hastings has a secret weapon: . She writes emotional devastation like a poet who just got dumped. “Missing him wasn't a feeling. It was a place I lived. I just hadn't figured out how to move out yet.” The Long Way Home doesn’t apologize for its toxicity. Instead, it argues that sometimes, “home” isn’t a healthy place. Sometimes, home is the person who knows exactly which scar to press because they were there when you got it. They use other human beings as pawns in

The premise is deceptively simple: Magnolia decides to take the “long way home”—both literally and metaphorically. After fleeing to the English countryside (a retreat that smells of wet wool and self-pity), she attempts to rebuild a version of herself that isn’t defined by Christian “BJ” Ballentine.