Hidden River, a memorable novel-in-flash by Sara Lippmann, opens with 35-year-old Cassie, the narrator, receiving an overseas wedding invitation from Sally Sellers, with whom she’s been out of touch for many years. The Sellers family once offered Cassie the illusion of stability; it is unclear what they may offer her now. Though it is written mostly in the forceful snippets of flash fiction, Lippmann displays her characteristic blend of power and poetry throughout, lending Hidden River the emotional heft of a more conventional novel.

The Schuylkill River, on Philadelphia’s western edge, is at the novel’s heart. Cassie grew up in Philly with her neglectful mother, Rosie, a sometime astrologer who was delighted when Cassie became enmeshed with the higher-class family of her best friend, Sally. Looking back, Cassie describes the Schuylkill as “my sole companion, an unwitting mirror to the squint of morning, a dull comfort of slate at dusk.” Lippmann, a native Philadelphian who now lives in Brooklyn, does a masterful job of depicting this place with the mixture of affection and impatience one often feels for one’s hometown. 

A runner whose daily route takes her along the river, Cassie notes that its Dutch name means Hidden River, which to her seems right “because secrets never rest on the surface; wind ruffles through it like a ghost.” Like the river, Cassie is haunted as well, by memories of Len, Sally’s father, whom Cassie describes as the man “with his hand down my track shorts throughout high school.” Cassie was a junior in college when Len died, and she dropped out upon learning the news. Now celibate and nearly solitary, Cassie lives in a sixth-floor walk-up and works at a high-end women’s clothing store in a posh part of Philadelphia. Folding clothes at work, Cassie believes “[t]here is something to be said for monotony, for repeating the same motions over and over.”

Cassie’s sporadic relationship with her mother provides one of this novel’s unsettling story lines. Another involves Cassie’s evolving relationship with her only friend, a woman named Tracy who is the same age as Cassie’s mother. Episodes from Cassie’s earlier life are interspersed with the present-day narrative, revealing how Sally and her family “absorbed” Cassie while Cassie’s mother lived her bohemian life. Although Cassie was twelve and Len forty when they became involved, Cassie has no regrets, recalling that she loved him with “the single-minded obsession of a child.” 

Tracy entices Cassie to yoga class, and then to the Jersey Shore to celebrate the Fourth of July. There, Cassie meets Ajax, Tracy’s disaffected teenaged son. Ajax is spending the summer on the Shore where he works, when needed, at a Mammal Stranding Station. Tracy enlists Cassie to talk with her son, to find out what he’s up to. A stray dog named Delilah shows up and doesn’t leave; Cassie and Ajax begin to share responsibility for her. When Cassie buys her first cell phone, she and Ajax begin a relationship via text. As she re-engages with the world by learning to use modern technology, she also relives her past with Rosie, Len, and the Sellers family. How will Sally and her family welcome Cassie now? How will Cassie weather it?  

Compared to Cassie’s chaotic childhood, Sally’s appeared orderly and presentable. In middle school, when the girls became friends, Sally was extremely organized. Her locker was “outfitted with a stick-on mirror and white board” while she “had sleeve compartments in which she stored each folder, and it was amazing to picture the inside of her brain like that, upright and color-coded.” As a bride, Sally orchestrates every detail of her wedding guests’ experiences. Sally’s obsessive need for control seems to be connected to her father’s abuse of Cassie and other family secrets. 

The author of two previous story collections and a moving novel, Lech, Lippmann is a confident writer who handles emotionally fraught material with ease. In Hidden River, Lippmann prompts the reader’s sympathy for Tracy, Ajax, and the Sellers family–if not so much for Rosie–and convinces the reader to care for Cassie as well, to root for this stunted person as she learns to navigate a treacherous hidden river. 

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Sara Lippmann is the author of the novel Lech (2022) and the story collections Doll Palace (2014) and Jerks (2025). Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible (2025) from SUNY Press. She is a co-founder of Writing Co-lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor-in-chief of Epiphany magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.

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Sarah Holloway lives in Savannah, GA. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly‘s blog, Heavy Feather Review, Roi Fainéant, Emerge Literary Journal, The Argyle, the Ekphrastic Review, Cowboy Jamboree, and elsewhere. She’s @sarahholloway.bsky.social.