Some books announce themselves. Others accumulate quietly over years—in the margins of other work, in the back of a journal, in the particular way a writer returns, again and again, to the same images without yet knowing what they mean.
The Grovebegan as a writing prompt. Brooks Whitney Phillips was a member of an all-women's writing group that met at the Key West Library—a gathering of writers who came together to write, read aloud, and respond to each other's work. It was the kind of room where serious things could happen quietly, without announcement.
The prompt produced something unexpected. The story that came out of it did not feel like an exercise. It felt like the beginning of something that had been waiting for permission to exist. Phillips recognized it immediately: this was the story that was always bubbling underneath.
“It was always bubbling underneath. I just needed the right moment—the right room, the right prompt—to let it surface.”
— Brooks Whitney Phillips
Written in Stolen Moments
Phillips wrote much of The Grove in what writers sometimes call stolen moments—the hours before the rest of the house is awake, the hour after everyone else is asleep, the windows of time carved out around other obligations. She was not writing for a market or an audience. She was writing because the story required it.
This is the kind of writing that produces something particular: work that has been lived with, turned over, reconsidered. Work that has had time to become what it needed to be, rather than what it was first intended to be.
The Marianne Russo Award
The Key West Literary Seminar is one of the most important literary institutions in American letters—a gathering that brings together writers, scholars, and readers around a single theme each year. Its awards recognize work in progress of uncommon promise.
Phillips received the Marianne Russo Award for Novel-in-Progress from the Key West Literary Seminar. The award is given to a work of fiction that demonstrates exceptional literary merit and the promise of a significant contribution to American literature. It was the signal that what had begun as a writing prompt had become something more.
Viking · Penguin Random House
The Grove was acquired by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House with a history of publishing literary fiction of consequence. It was published on June 17, 2025, to starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal, and was selected as a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults.
Phillips has said that she did not set out to write a young adult novel—she wrote the story she wanted to tell, and the designation followed because of her protagonist's age. The reviewers who have praised The Grove most ardently are adults who recognize in it something that does not belong to any single audience: the particular grief of a world that has passed, and the particular courage of two sisters who lived in it.