All Adults Here
Fiction
Riverhead Books
May 4, 2020
E-book
368
Publisher via Edelweiss
When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence?
Astrid’s youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is intentionally pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his adult life according to standards no one else shares. But who gets to decide, so many years later, which long-ago lapses were the ones that mattered? Who decides which apologies really count? It might be that only Astrid’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love the most.
In All Adults Here, Emma Straub’s unique alchemy of wisdom, humor, and insight come together in a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood, whether we like them to or not.
My review:
My past experience with this author has been mixed. I liked Vacationland and found Modern Lovers to be meh. So I was excited to jump into this one and see which way this story took me. I really liked this one, in fact it may be my favorite of Straub's books that I've read! This had the two things going for it that I adore in a story, dysfunctional family and a character driven plot. In fact if you are someone who enjoys a book with a lot of action and plot, look away 🙂 Things do happen in this book, but they are more of the more mundane daily existence kind. There were side stories going on with all the characters and I really enjoyed all of them. Each was unique in its own way. While I can't say that all the characters were endearing, they each had their own good traits as well as fallacies. My favorite was August, who I think expressed the main theme of the book which was to always tell the truth to those you love. Some of the characters took the long way around this in their lives, but ultimately learned that to tell your truth is to be free from your psychological burdens.
A great character driven novel about family, with an emphasis on parenting, birth order expectations, telling your truth and being happy in your own skin. If you love a good family story, this one fits the bill nicely.
I've read multiple good reviews of this one. I've been in kind of a reading funk this week, so I'm not sure a purely character driven novel is in the cards for me just yet. Still, I look forward to reading this one whenever the mood finally strikes me!
It has a lot of characters, and lots of subplots, but is fast moving. Hope you enjoy it when it feels like the right time for you to read.