All together now by Julie buxbaum

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Every once in a while, when you read as many books as I do, a book comes along that completely blows you away. All Together Now by Julie Buxbaum was that book for me.

I’m writing this in September 2026, when there are still only a handful of reviews out there, and I’m already calling it: this is going to be one of my favorite books of 2027.

Hazel Stein was born in 1975, and every decade or so, something impossible happens. She spends one night aboard a party bus with different versions of herself—from eight-year-old Hazel all the way through Hazel at 77. They’re all there together, at different stages of the same life, knowing different things about what has happened and what is still to come.

Eight-year-old Hazel keeps making paper airplanes. Eighteen-year-old Hazel is perpetually embarrassed. Forty-nine-year-old Hazel is bald. Sixty-eight-year-old Hazel may have had a little too much plastic surgery. 😂 Some versions of Hazel immediately understand one another; others absolutely do not.

And yes, there’s a magical-realism element here. But if you’re hearing “mysterious party bus filled with versions of the same woman” and thinking, Nope, I hate magical realism when nobody explains it, let me put your mind at ease: the bus is the device, not the point.

The point is Hazel’s life.

This is a story about joy and grief. Friendship and love. Tragedies, disappointments, triumphs, and all the ordinary moments in between. It’s about the different people we become over the course of a lifetime—and the strange realization that every one of those people is still somehow us.

I’m only a couple of years younger than Hazel, and I think that made this book hit me particularly hard. How could you not wonder what it would be like to sit across from your eight-year-old self? Your eighteen-year-old self? Which version of you would become your ally? Which one would look at your life and think, THIS is what we became?!

And what would you want to ask the woman you’ll be at 77?

There’s something profound about that idea. Think about going to someone’s funeral and meeting a person who knew her when she was sixteen, while you knew her when she was seventy. You both loved the same woman—and yet, in some ways, you knew entirely different people. All Together Now captures that beautifully.

It’s also genuinely funny. I laughed out loud several times, particularly when the various Hazels are interacting with one another. Hazel also has wonderful people in her life, including two incredibly supportive friends, and I loved the way the people closest to her simply accept this bizarre thing that happens to her every decade.

But this book also made me cry. A lot.

I’ve seen comparisons to The Wedding People, and that always makes me nervous because that is an awfully high bar for me. But I’m here to tell you: I really did love this as much as The Wedding People. I’d also put it alongside One & Only by Maurene Goo, Into the Blue by Emma Brodie, and Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves. They’re very different books, but each explores some version of the same enormous questions: Who are we at different stages of our lives? How do our relationships shape us? And how do we keep choosing joy when grief and loss are inevitable?

One of the questions in this book that stopped me cold was: “How are we all able to live knowing that we and everyone we love will die?”

And somehow, for a book so interested in mortality, All Together Now never feels hopeless. Quite the opposite. It made me think about how astonishing it is that we get to be so many people during one lifetime.

I suspect this will hit especially hard for women around Hazel’s age—those of us in that sandwich-generation stage of life, looking backward at who we’ve been while becoming increasingly aware of our own mortality. We’re watching our children grow up, watching our parents age, and starting to look at time a little differently ourselves. But I certainly don’t think you have to be a middle-aged woman to find something meaningful here.

This is deeply emotional, unexpectedly funny, and ultimately a beautiful meditation on what it means to get a life—and then actually live it.

I cried. I laughed. I sobbed. And when it was over, I knew I would read it again.

One of my favorite books of 2027. Calling it now.

Thank you to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for providing me with an advance reading copy.