O'Nan's hefty novel is proof positive that an engrossing, encompassing read doesn't have to include international spies, doomed spacecraft, intricate heists, or high-speed car chases. There are no superheroes here, no monstrous villains â just a group of people related by blood or marriage, who come together for one last week at the summer home which is being sold after multiple generations of the Maxwell family have made memories there.
The narrative follows the quotidian tasks of surviving a week in close contact with multiple generations of an extended family. What are we eating, who is cooking it, who has to do the dishes? What do we do when it rains and the youngest generation is antsy and bored? Anyone who has ever endured a family reunion, particularly as an in-law or adolescent, will recognize the endless jigsaw puzzle, board game, enforced family fun events as excruciating chores, occasionally tinged by grudgingly acknowledged â if fleeting â moments of incandescence.
But it's also an incisive look at nine people whose pasts and futures, needs and wants, have interlocked in a towering Jenga of love and resentment, memory and loss, struggle and acceptance. And every one of them, from retired teacher Arlene, seeing her brother's widow cavalierly parting with a property that by rights should be half hers, to eight-year-old Justin, struggling with his parents' divorce and the heavy burden of always being the baby of the group, gets their POV moment. The characters run true and deep, rubbing against each other in the lakeside cabin, sorting through the keepsakes and deciding what to take and what to leave behind as they prepare for this watershed event in all their lives.
A satisfying, juicy read, regardless of the season.
The narrative follows the quotidian tasks of surviving a week in close contact with multiple generations of an extended family. What are we eating, who is cooking it, who has to do the dishes? What do we do when it rains and the youngest generation is antsy and bored? Anyone who has ever endured a family reunion, particularly as an in-law or adolescent, will recognize the endless jigsaw puzzle, board game, enforced family fun events as excruciating chores, occasionally tinged by grudgingly acknowledged â if fleeting â moments of incandescence.
But it's also an incisive look at nine people whose pasts and futures, needs and wants, have interlocked in a towering Jenga of love and resentment, memory and loss, struggle and acceptance. And every one of them, from retired teacher Arlene, seeing her brother's widow cavalierly parting with a property that by rights should be half hers, to eight-year-old Justin, struggling with his parents' divorce and the heavy burden of always being the baby of the group, gets their POV moment. The characters run true and deep, rubbing against each other in the lakeside cabin, sorting through the keepsakes and deciding what to take and what to leave behind as they prepare for this watershed event in all their lives.
A satisfying, juicy read, regardless of the season.
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