Review of Barbara by Joni Murphy

*Barbara* by Joni Murphy (2025). Published by Astra House.

If you’re new here and found this blog through the mysterious powers of the Internet, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I’m a dedicated reader and movie watcher who thought to turn this website into a little digital archive of sorts.

I was watching and reading so much that I wanted to keep track of it all, so I began blogging as a way to keep these books as memories somewhat forever.

That said, I recently fell into a period of unemployment, and this blog was a solace for me. Not only was it a way to make a little bit of money when there was nothing else coming my way really, but I found, after getting my finances in order, that I enjoyed sitting down to write blog posts when I had nothing else to do in my day.

I’ve been dubbing this period as funemployment while I look for a job, but the job market isn’t looking too great right now. Regardless, I spend a lot of time in my local library, and because I am such a big fan of simple living, I enjoy the little moments where I can find a book for free here or there, while also supporting such a critical aspect of my community.

While I do love going to the library, I have a massive list of advance copies to get through. At the time of typing this, in January, I had to put a stop to accepting advance copies because I was spending too much time on them and not the books I wanted to read in the moment.

What drew me into this book originally was the cover, then the synopsis. The nuclear age is something that I love reading about in my nonfiction, but I also worked in the entertainment world as a critic and studied women’s issues in graduate school. All of these are combined in some ways in Barbara, and the synopsis hooked me like a fish.

I finished the book pretty quickly. One could say I was devouring it as the pace I was going, and I only stopped because I had other work to do for my freelance jobs.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

An actress in the mid-twentieth century grapples with her career, mother’s suicide, and her father’s role in the Manhattan Project.

This is a historical novel, and it takes place across the course of one woman’s coming of age and early adulthood. The titular character is Barbara, who was born before the outbreak of World War II, but her childhood is going to be defined by it.

Her father is an engineer, and he’s been hired to work with the Manhattan Project. He is one of the people who are going to help make the atomic bombs happen; this will be something that Barbara returns to often throughout the course of the book, even when she leaves small town America behind for New York City.

We don’t get her parents’ full stories until the end of the book, told through the perspective of Barbara, but this novel is very much shaped by Barbara’s parent’s decisions. When she is thirteen, her mother commits suicide, leaving behind a massive shadow over the rest of her life. This is a major trauma, and maybe even a reason Barbara, once an adult, flees the desert.

She moves to New York City and tries to lay down her roots there, picking up small jobs and eventually making a name for herself as an actress. Most of the book dwells on her adventures of an actress, especially as it takes her all over the world, and how she takes on multiple different kinds of roles depending on the film and situation.

There are also stories of love within her world, although it doesn’t always end happily. She does get divorced, then marries a man who also has some major trauma involving the war and is a filmmaker himself. He’s a director, and while their story might be a happy one, there’s a journey in getting there.

We’re really looking deep into Barbara’s own psyche and trauma through the lens of filmmaking and her acting career, which is a fascinating way to approach this novel. She has a lot of baggage, obviously from the previous plot points, but how she takes on an acting role defines how she shape shifts and tries to change her life.

One might call this a dive into a singular character, aka a character study, which works well with the context of the protagonist’s story. I also loved how seeped it was in the world of film, making sure that the novel also plays homage to the universe she exists within.

Overall Thoughts

As I mentioned before, I devoured this novel. I really liked the prose and writing style throughout it, and I thought that it was consistent in the sense that the pacing was well-done. There weren’t moments where I wanted to put the book down.

I could see this novel becoming one of those books that are compared to Sylvia Plath, minus the misogynistic legacy that’s been constructed around her. It’s seeped in girlhood and despite the sheer amount of trauma contained within these pages, there’s a major essence of a cool girl in this character.

Personally, I love stories like these, and the fact it’s set in the middle of the century hits right in my sweet spot of interests. If you have similar interests, I recommend picking up this book!

Much love to the publisher, NetGalley, and the author for the advance copy. I truly enjoyed it.

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