All Adults Here by Emma Straub

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.

The kind of book that makes you feel warm inside. Life, love, family, small town, everybody's mostly happy most of the time. Can recommend as a light reading to help cheer up.

this was like gilmore girls (with all the white privilege of new england) but emily smoked weed and lorelai wasn't a perpetual child

i unexpectedly really enjoyed this book. it felt detached in a sense while we followed this family through a small period of time yet learned so much about them and all the traumas that their family structure and experiences imparted onto each member. as someone who has experienced multigenerational trauma and wishes so desperately that the perpetuators of said trauma could wake the fuck up and apologize for what they've done, i really appreciated this story

i will say that while queer characters have some limelight in this book, their stories reek of white privilege, so i would proceed with caution. it's nice to read how easy and fluffy queer life is for them (in comparison to the experiences of QBIPOC) but also man am i salty i'll never have a coming out like that lol

interested in reading more from emma straub if i can get a lovely intertwined cast of characters like this again!!