Below is the complete list of Kristin Harmel’s Good Intentions books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Good Intentions Books
About Good Intentions
Good Intentions is a collaborative short-story collection centered on motherhood rather than a conventional series written entirely by Kristin Harmel. Published in 2023, the project brings together seven authors—Rebecca Serle, Kristina McMorris, Charmaine Wilkerson, Kristin Harmel, Etaf Rum, Sejal Badani, and Angie Kim—each contributing a separate story about the emotional complexity of being a mother, becoming a mother, or understanding a mother’s choices. Harmel’s contribution is The Road Home.
The collection is unified by theme rather than by recurring characters or a continuous plot. Each author approaches motherhood from a different cultural, historical, and emotional perspective, allowing the stories to move between pregnancy, memory, sacrifice, grief, family secrets, migration, reconciliation, and the shifting relationship between parents and adult children. Because the narratives are independent, they can be read separately, although together they create a broader portrait of motherhood as something far less predictable than an idealized role.
Harmel’s The Road Home is the fourth story in the collection and is also the installment most closely aligned with the historical fiction that has come to define her later career. Set during World War II in France, it follows Marie Vachon, a woman whose life changes after she takes in a Jewish refugee named Josiane during the German occupation.
What begins as an act of temporary protection gradually becomes a deeply maternal relationship. Marie provides the girl with safety and stability during an extraordinarily dangerous period, but years spent together create a bond that cannot simply be undone when circumstances change. The story ultimately turns on a painful question: whether loving a child can also require relinquishing her.
That conflict makes The Road Home particularly characteristic of Harmel’s historical fiction. Large events are experienced through intimate personal decisions rather than through military action or political leadership. The occupation matters because of what it forces ordinary people to risk, conceal, sacrifice, and ultimately surrender. Harmel also returns to subjects familiar from novels such as The Book of Lost Names and The Paris Daughter: Jewish persecution in wartime France, the protection of vulnerable children, families divided by war, and the moral consequences of choices made under occupation.
The other Good Intentions stories broaden the theme considerably. Rebecca Serle’s The Magician examines a daughter preparing for motherhood while reflecting on her unconventional mother. Kristina McMorris’s Poppy’s Story places a pregnant schoolteacher against the anxieties of 1962. Charmaine Wilkerson’s Deluge uses family discoveries to challenge what a woman believes about her mother and herself. Etaf Rum’s Mother Country, Sejal Badani’s The Days Before Us, and Angie Kim’s A Planned Occasion approach maternal relationships through immigration, trauma, second chances, grief, and memory.
The result is less a series in the traditional sense than a curated anthology of connected ideas. There is no shared fictional universe and no continuing protagonist whose story develops across all seven entries. Instead, Good Intentions asks different authors to examine the instinct to protect, the limits of parental control, and the sometimes painful distance between what a mother intends and how those choices are eventually understood.
Within Kristin Harmel’s bibliography, The Road Home is therefore best treated as a standalone historical short story contributed to a multi-author collection. Its compact form nevertheless carries many of the concerns found throughout her longer historical novels: ordinary courage, wartime displacement, difficult maternal choices, and the lasting emotional consequences of love expressed through sacrifice.