All Adults Here
Author: Emma Straub
Publisher: Riverhead
View on Goodreads
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
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.
TL;DR Review
All Adults Here manages to be fun and heartwarming while real and emotional at the same time. I really liked it.
For you if: You are looking for something that carries weight without feeling too heavy.
Full Review
I’ve been looking forward to reading Emma Straub’s All Adults Here since its cover was revealed months ago. Straub has four other popular books, and she and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore that’s core to the NYC (and, more specifically, Brooklyn) community.
I read the book over two days one weekend. It starts out fun and immediately endearing, with a chapter that features one of the main characters, Astrid. She is the matriarch of a family from a small town a few hours north of NYC, and her voice comes across strong and quirky. That morning, she witnesses a woman she’s known her whole life get hit and killed by a bus. This sets off a chain reaction in which she really starts to examine the life she’s lived and get more intentional about the one she’s currently living.
We also meet many other members of her family, including her granddaughter Cecilia, who comes to live with her to switch junior high schools; her daughter Porter, who owns a specialty goat cheese farm and has decided to have a baby via artificial insemination; her other two sons; and even more orbital characters who become loved ones to us, the reader, as well as to these characters.
We never lose the fun and the voice-iness of the book, but little by little, Straub peels back layers on these characters’ lives that reveal them to be complex, flawed, deeply beautiful people with rich pasts and legitimate motivations.
Also, you may not immediately know it from the book’s synopsis, but this story features some beautiful queer characters and storylines, which seemed to me to be done so, so well.
This book is about the mistakes we make, both as children and as parents, and that even the best of intentions can’t prevent them altogether. All we can do is try our best, learn from the mistakes, and work together to heal from them. It’s about what we would see if we could actually spend a day in another person’s shoes. It’s about the importance of empathy and communication and family and understanding.
Trigger Warnings
Pregnancy
Abortion
Transphobia and trans misogyny
Homophobia and heterosexism
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