Robin lived through trauma: the rages of her father, the coalescence of her mother, and the fall from grace of her brother Will (none of which Will–the former collegiate basketball star and recipient of their father’s praise–seems able to understand). When Robin picks up and moves to South Bend Indiana on a teaching fellowship, she doesn’t expect to hear from Will again after telling him she’s somewhere safe.
Readers of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine will draw similarities between it and the dark humor living left of center in the first-person narrative voice of Leila Renee’s debut novel, Soft Spots. While Robin might not understand the cruelty of her father, those bruises still fading from her skin, she knows that smoking seems to numb the pain or at least enshroud her in a fugue that passes the time in supplement of friends.
Naomi, fellow recipient of the teaching scholarship, buzzes with potential: she really wants to change these kids’ lives, and plus, pursuing Columbia hoping the Ivy League name will provide the validation she craves from her mother. Anyone who’s ever lived with someone or stalked the shadow of a social media profile that seems to eclipse your own will empathize with the longing Robin feels for a mother-daughter relationship like Naomi’s. For two transplants who share a racial background, the emotional distance between Robin and Naomi is palpable.
Without a short supply of connection, Naomi is smitten with a new-teacher romance—perhaps the one rule she will break—so Robin spends most of the time in the apartment in silence, tallying up their social interactions and level of closeness. The novel begins with the parasocial relationship before the two become roommates, grounding the timeline when she achieves A Room of One’s Own and puts a state line between herself and the trauma.
This narrative choice places us in Robin’s psyche experiencing the rages of her father only after they occurred, positioning them as a reliving, rather than putting us in her childhood home. Will, who still lives with his parents after dropping out of school, feels betrayed that Robin left him and betrayed when she refuses to return while their father is hospitalized.
Will experiences Robin’s absence in present tense, oscillating between South Bend, the hospital, and their home; this puts him in a different temporal space than his sibling and highlights how two children in the same home experience trauma differently. For Robin, she fixates on Naomi as an emblem of what it must be like to be loved by your parents—and this fills her thoughts in the present, while the past serves as an intrusion.
There are some similarities to Kylie Reid’s Come and Get It, both in the school staff’s microaggressions towards race in their inability to see how it affects Robin’s experience, who nonetheless catalogues the constant unprofessionalism from her assigned manager, Mrs. N. However, the young girl Larissa, forces Robin to confront what she would do when seeing the pain of someone else, paralleling her own past, through what’s left unsaid—a split lip, an eagerness to please, like Robin is to Naomi, and a constant request for companionship.
Sometimes the people we live with are strangers to us. Despite showing her tender underbelly to Naomi, Robin’s requests for companionship are met with a confusing mix of scorn and comfort, before finally settling into cool acquaintance.
However, for those where blood runs thicker, resolution remains more complex, like Robin’s reflection following her father’s passing:
“Will drove us home. Celia reclined in the passenger seat and sucked a Salem so hard that her cheeks caved. She didn’t roll down her window, and she didn’t explain what she said the previous night. I know he wasn’t perfect. Well, I thought, if you knew he wasn’t perfect then why didn’t you stop him? I had wanted to ask her that before I left the kitchen, but I knew there would be no point. I didn’t long for my mother the way a daughter should.”
Soft Spots, a coming of age novel, confronts its trauma and faces death and nonbelievers to reach a shared understanding, but it does so after heeding the call to leave the place that was hurting you, so that you can give your hardened heart the distance and time to grow tender again.
FICTION
Soft Spots
By Leila Renee
Amistad
Published August 4, 2026
