All Adults Here
Emma Straub
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
All Adults Here
Emma Straub
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... bigly entertaining.
... delightful.
... delightful.
The skill of Straub’s writing is balancing soap opera-like plots with substantive emotional potency. With All Adults Here, Straub examines the ups and downs of small-town America with the critical eye of a skeptical urbanite.
... delightful.
Inevitably, some of these threads turn out to be more compelling than others, and the piling on of certain strenuously 2020 topics (trans kids, gentrification, late-in-life sexual fluidity) can feel a little too tidily invoked. But mostly, Straub is in her sweet spot; Like Celeste Ng or Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, she has the gift of finding freshness in familiar narratives through cleverly tweaked archetypes and small, clear observations.
Reading Emma Straub’s breezy new novel All Adults Here left me with a pleasantly soothed feeling.
Emma Straub's warm-hearted fourth novel confirms her reign as a patron saint of delayed adolescence.
All Adults Here tackles a laundry list of big-ticket items, any one of which could have commanded its own book: transgenderism, homosexuality, abortion, bullying, artificial insemination and extramarital affairs among them. Straub juggles the weighty topics with a feather-light touch, funny without being flip, with keen insights into how we evolve through every stage of life.
... excellent.
... eight characters...are all endearing in their disarmingly muddleheaded or abjectly truth-seeking ways.
No one engages a reader quite like Emma Straub. I was 30 pages into her warmhearted new novel, All Adults Here, before I even realized it. Her writing is witty, informal and deceptively simple, drawing readers in as if they’re having a conversation with a close friend.
In this engaging novel, Straub explores the ups and downs of a somewhat disaffected 21st-century family with warmth, sympathy, and humor..
...delightful.
The sudden death of a frenemy, hit by a school bus, knocks widowed Strick family matriarch Astrid’s own life slightly off course.
...witty, topical.
As always, Straub (Modern Lovers, 2016, etc.) draws her characters warmly, making them appealing in their self-centeredness and generosity, their insecurity and hope.