All Adults Here
The Strick family generally gets along, but each adult member inhabits their own orbit. When Astrid witnesses a bus accident that the death of an acquaintance, she realizes that she needs to come clean to her kids about a few things--namely, her relationship with a woman. But Elliott, Porter, and Nicky each have their own struggles. Add on Astrid's 13-year-old grand-daughter moving in with her after a bullying incident and there's more than enough dysfunction to go around.
While there was a bit of overload of themes here, they mostly just added some wonderful complexity to this dysfunctional family story. The alternating narratives and fast pace made this an enjoyable listen.
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Publisher’s 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 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.
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