Publication Date February 24, 2026
I generally am a fan of Anna Q, so I was happy when my book club chose it for a future discussion, and grateful that I had a review copy of More Than Enough thanks to Random House and NetGalley. But wait, did I say “book club”??? The story here revolves around high school English teacher Polly Goodman. The women in her book club (her closest friends) give her an Ancestry-type DNA test kit as a joke, and this sets off a whole boatload of unexpected events and revelations. (Aside: the college library where I worked and taught for years offered a “Family History” degree, so I took classes and did the whole genealogy thing – and got a few surprises. Like we were always told our father’s parents were long gone, and I found out that not only was my paternal grandmother alive when I was a child, she lived basically a few blocks away! Now I wonder what the heck was going on, and why we never met her? And was she maybe secretly watching us grow up? But – I digress).
Polly takes the test, and it comes back with a match to a stranger. She apparently has a fairly close relative she had never heard of! Polly is sure there is an error, but is still prompted to dig through her family tree to find answers. She knows it wasn’t her gay brother who created a relative out there, so that meant it had to be from her mother or father. She is then contacted by a stranger who tells her that she has also taken the test, learned of the existence of a relative (Polly), and wants to meet. Then things really take a turn!
Polly has a wonderful husband, and they have been trying for YEARS to have a child, without success. Polly’s book club members are her closest friends, so they are in on the whole thing,including IVF struggles, DNA test, etc. Her marriage is beyond wonderful, and the one area she has struggled with is her relationship with her mother. As the story unfolds, the reader gets Quindlen’s typical wonderful writing about family, friendships, and life in general. As expected, there is a ton of wit, humor, and a deep dive into the whole topic of relationships both inside and outside the immediate family. It’s quite a story, and she tells it well.
Polly learns way more than she expected when she received that DNA test, and lives are changed in very profound ways. I expected to enjoy the book, and I did. My ONLY reason for the four stars instead of five is the “resolution” which was just a tiny bit too clever, although in retrospect I can’t offer any suggestion for how it might have been resolved any other way. So, four stars from me, and a solid recommendation for this one. I’m looking forward to talking with my book club about this one!
P.S. I remember vividly the way the professor who taught family history told us that every semester SOMEONE in the class got a surprise, sometimes a HUGE one, which they often shared with her. Although I didn’t get more than the grandmother’s existence and the fact that my family in Kentucky were slaveholders, my friend found out that the woman he had always thought was his mother was actually his grandmother, and the woman he thought was his sister was actually his birth mother. Yikes.