Book Review: All Adults Here by Emma Straub

All Adults Here by Emma Straub
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publication Date: May 4, 2020
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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.

All Adults Here is a character driven novel about Astrid and her three grown children. When Astrid witnesses her frenemy Barbara get hit and killed by a school bus, she starts to reevaluate her own life choices. She wonders if it’s too late to right some of the parenting mistakes she makes when her kids were young. At the same time, her teenage granddaughter comes to live with her, giving her a chance to do things right on the first try.

Her oldest son is a tightly wound, somewhat bitter man. Her daughter is single and pregnant by choice and her youngest son is bohemian who is also a bit of a stoner. It’s his daughter that comes to live with Astrid.

Emma Straub writes fantastic characters. She’s able to make their inner monologues both introspective and full of wry humor. Astrid was my favorite. She had the greatest lines. Here’s one I really liked:

“She herself [Astrid] was an only child, and she found old people with siblings somewhat ridiculous, as if they were eighty-year-olds who still wore water wings in swimming pools. Siblings were for the very young and needy. She had given her children siblings to occupy each other in childhood.”

This book addresses so many facets of life, it would make a great book club selection. It’s got LGBT issues, single motherhood, adultery, bullying, death and divorce. It sounds like a lot but I didn’t think it was overloaded. Straub did a wonderful job weaving everything together in an organic way. Although the characters in All Adults Here deal with some serious problems, it never gets too heavy. You won’t feel depressed after reading it and that’s important in these times.

I’ve loved the books I’ve previously read by Emma Sraub and All Adults Here did not disappoint. Highly recommended.

Other books by Emma Straub I’ve reviewed:

Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures
The Vacationers