Book Review for All the Little Houses by May Cobb

 

All the Little Houses by May Cobb

Published:  January 20, 2026 by Sourcebooks Landmark

Genre:  Mystery Thriller, Historical Fiction, Suspense

Taken from Goodreads:  Adults can behave badly too...

It's the mid-1980s in the tiny town of Longview, Texas. Nellie Anderson, the beautiful daughter of the Anderson family dynasty, has burst onto the scene. She always gets what she wants. What she can't get for herself… well, that's what her mother is for. Because Charleigh Andersen, blond, beautiful, and ruthlessly cunning, remembers all too well having to claw her way to the top. When she was coming of age on the poor side of East Texas, she was a loser, an outcast, humiliated, and shunned by the in-crowd, whose approval she'd so desperately thirsted for. When a prairie-kissed family moves to town, all trad wife, woodworking dad, wholesome daughter vibes, Charleigh's entire self-made social empire threatens to crumble. Who will be left standing when the dust settles?

From the author of The Hunting Wives comes a deliciously wicked new thriller about mean girls, mean moms, and the delicious secrets inside all the little houses.

 

My Thoughts:  Mean girls encouraged by mean moms with a lot of secrets.   This book pulled me in from the beginning and I never wanted to put the book down.  

A new family, The Swifts, comes to town and shakes everything up.   The mom’s want the Swift mom’s magic potions, the Swift dad is a talented carpenter with high end products, and the Swift daughters are unique.  I just knew that something BIG was going to happen with this family right in the middle of it all. 

The secrets and unknowns in this book are so deep.   I have finished the book and I am still left with the need to know, the need for more, and the hope that there is more to come.  

May Cobb is a must-read author.  All the Little Houses cements her even deeper into that status.

Thank you Sourcebooks Landmark for a copy of the book via NetGalley.

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Meet the Author (taken from her website):  I grew up in the piney woods of East Texas where my thrillers A LIKEABLE WOMAN, MY SUMMER DARLINGS, THE HUNTING WIVES and BIG WOODS are set. After college, I moved to San Francisco where I studied Victorian Literature for my Masters, and gravitated towards that era’s detective novels, known as “sensation novels”, such as Wilke Collins’ THE WOMAN IN WHITE. I then lived in Los Angeles for a few years where I worked for writer/director Ron Shelton and his wife, the actor Lolita Davidovich.

I currently live in Austin, Texas, with my husband and son where we enjoy traipsing around the area’s many beautiful parks. I also enjoy napping, staring into space, making to-do lists for my to-do lists, shoveling cookies down my throat when I’m writing a particularly difficult scene (and even when I’m not), wearing my PJ’s as often as I can get away with and collapsing into bed at the end of a day with a great book.

I’m currently finishing a book about the late, jazz great, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, a project which has been in the works for twenty years. Kirk was a human phenomenon—a multi-instrumentalist who was best known for his miraculous ability to play three saxophones simultaneously. During his brief life, he defied staggering odds—from blindness, to prejudice, to a paralyzing stroke—in order to play the music that came to him through dreams. His story is what made me want to become a writer.

My writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Austin Monthly, and Texas Highways Magazine.

My proudest achievement remains clinching 1st place in the UIL competition for Personal Writing when I was in the 4th grade.