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Book Reviewed by:A warm, funny, and keenly perceptive novel about the life cycle of one family--as the kids become parents, grandchildren become teenagers, and a matriarch confronts the legacy of her mistakes. From the New York Times bestselling author of Modern Lovers and The Vacationers.
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 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.
Chapter 1
The Quick Death
Astrid Strick had never liked Barbara Baker, not for a single day of their forty-year acquaintance, but when Barbara was hit and killed by the empty, speeding school bus at the intersection of Main and Morrison streets on the eastern side of the town roundabout, Astrid knew that her life had changed, the shock of which was indistinguishable from relief. It was already a busy day-she'd spent the morning in the garden, she had a haircut appointment at 11:30, and then her granddaughter, Cecelia, was arriving by train with two suitcases and zero parents (no school bus accidents there-just a needed escape hatch), and Astrid was to meet her at the Clapham station to bring her back to the Big House.
The bus hit Barbara just after eleven. Astrid was sitting in her parked car on the inner lane of the roundabout, the verdant circle at the center of town, adjusting her hair in the mirror. It was always the way, wasn't it, that one's hair always looked best on the day of a...
The mood of Straub's novel is by turns serious and sunny, and the experience of reading it is so effortless and enjoyable that readers might not even notice just how skillfully the author juggles a handful of narrative points of view, not to mention numerous conflicts, issues and themes. All Adults Here celebrates the connections between family members and within communities, acknowledging interdependence while also recognizing that relationships—and the individuals within them—will not cease changing...continued
Full Review
(656 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth
All Adults Here is a novel about how we try and fail at every age and yet somehow survive. It is brimming with kindness, forgiveness, humor and love and yet (magically) is also a page turner that held me captive until it was finished. This is Emma Straub's absolute best and the world will love it. I love it. Elizabeth Strout, New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again
A totally engaging and smart book about the absolutely marvelous messiness of what makes up family; a wonderful book.
Clapham, the idyllic Hudson Valley town in which Emma Straub sets All Adults Here, is fictional, but the author places it in a very real geographical setting. Her characters mention real places, including Rhinebeck, "one town north" along the Hudson River, which bears some resemblance to Straub's description of Clapham.
Rhinebeck is a town of around 7500 year-round residents located about 100 miles north of New York City. Prior to European settlement, the area was home to the Sepasco tribe. The Dutch began settling there in the 1680s, and shortly thereafter it became the location of the Beekman Arms, now the oldest continually operating inn in the United States (and yes, George Washington stayed there). Henry Beekman, the inn's ...
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