Excerpt from The Blessings by Elise Juska, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"March," Abby says. "Spring break."

"Good," her aunt says, and Abby smiles. She knows they all expect she'll move back here after graduation. But Abby has always harbored a quiet, slightly worrying suspicion that the life her family adopts so effortlessly—meeting someone local, getting married and having babies and staying in Philadelphia, carrying on all the old traditions—won't happen for her, not so easily. Now that's she been to college, she feels even more sure. Yet to live anywhere else is unimaginable, too.

There is a commotion at the other end of the table—her cousins Stephen and Joey and her brother, Alex, crashing into the room. They descend on the desserts in a flurry of boyness—shiny jerseys, loud swishing athletic pants, giant hands, and giant appetites. Abby watches her shy, skinny brother cram a snowball cookie into his mouth, flip his shaggy hair from his face, eyes lowered. He is not as cool as his cousins, but he tries his hardest, hiding behind the mop of hair he thinks makes him invisible but actually makes him more conspicuous.

"Drink? Cake? Can I get you a piece of cake?"

The aunts are in motion, cutting the boys generous slabs and beaming as they head back to the living room, mouths full, sucking frosting off their thumbs—Stephen thick and slope-shouldered, Joey with his bristly crew cut and confident swagger, Alex hunched and bony—where they are absorbed back into the crowd of men around the TV. Abby can just hear her roommates: You mean women in one room, men in the other? This has never struck Abby as strange before; it's never struck her at all. In ten years, things will be different. People will have died or divorced; lines will have blurred. But for now the men are in one room, the women in the other, and this demarcation feels comforting, familiar.

From her seat at the table, Abby watches her grandfather. Pop is sitting where he always does at Aunt Margie's: the big, soft recliner in the living room with the brown tweed arms. It is Uncle Joe's chair, which he gives up whenever Pop is here. Tonight, on his blue sweater, Pop is wearing a sticker with a frog on it—if you smoke, you croak! The frog dangles a cigarette from the corner of its mouth, like a waitress in a diner. A few weeks ago, Meghan had a school assembly about the dangers of smoking, and the school nurse had to call their mother because Meghan was crying so hard afterward she made herself throw up. It was surprising, Abby's mother had recounted calmly, but Abby heard the strain of concern in her voice. It was surprising, how upset she was. Abby didn't find it surprising. Meghan was always getting upset about things—whenever Abby went out with friends in high school, Meghan insisted she identify a "dedicated driver" (no matter that they were just going to the mall or the movies and Abby didn't even taste a beer until her senior year). Now there's Pop, wearing the sticker, curling on his blue sweater and losing its stick. But smoking is Pop's only vice, and one he can't be blamed for—they all know how he started by smoking the cigarettes in the Red Cross packages delivered to the POW camp in Germany—and he's always fed the habit quietly, slipping out onto porches and sidewalks, his jacket collar turned up against the wind. Now he's trying to quit, because of Meghan, though in less than two months it won't matter anymore. In early February, at five in the morning, Abby's hall phone will start to ring. At first she'll sleep right through it, waking only at the sound of the sharp knock—Abby! Phone!—and will find the receiver swinging from its thick silver cord, pointed at the floor. Hi, honey. Her throat will tighten instantly; her mother never calls her honey. A heart attack. Come right home. Abby will hang up and stand frozen in the hallway for several long minutes, blinking at the tattered flyers—Live Music in the Pub! and Peer Counseling Hotline—thinking: This is how it feels to get one of these phone calls. Back in her room, she'll study the sleeping body of Eric Winn, snoring under her Cousin Elena's crayon scribbles, which Aunt Lauren had translated in big block letters: TO ABBY, I MISS YOU! She will observe, numbly, the strangeness of these worlds colliding—the phone call and the drawings, Eric's ruddy chest and striped boxers—and how odd it is that he will be attached to this memory forever. How, after this, things could never work out between them. How she hopes Pop isn't up in heaven, watching. This is really weird, she says, but my grandfather just died—and Eric will be bleary but kind, and she'll manage to hold in her tears until he stumbles out, shoes in hand, leaving a sloppy, markered SORRY on the dry-erase board on her door.

Excerpted from The Blessings by Elise Juska. © 2014 by Elise Juska. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. by Elise Juska. Copyright © 2014 by Elise Juska. Excerpted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.