Review: All Adults Here

I’m excited to share my review of All Adults Here by Emma Straub with you all today! This was my book club pick for last month and we had a great discussion.

Synopsis

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 intentionally 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.

Why did I choose to read this book

This was a Read with Jenna pick earlier this year and it sounded like a good book to have a great discussion so we picked it as our book club book.

Rating

4 Stars (An Excellent book!)

My Thoughts

This was my first Emma Straub book and I really enjoyed it! Did you know she’s the owner of the famous Books are magic bookstore in Brooklyn, NY? I can’t wait to go there.

This is a slow, character driven story and I tend to not like those as much but there was something about this one that kept me engaged and I wanted to know how it ended. There are a lot of characters and can be a little hard to keep up at first (see the character template below) but once you meet all of them you see why they are necessary to the story.

I would describe this book as thought provoking, funny at times and real. We get to experience how this family evolves as the children become parents and the mom confronts the consequences of her mistakes. While I’m not a parent and I probably would experience this book differently if I was I found the topic of parenthood fascinating. There is not a right way to raise children and you get to see the different approaches to parenthood of the various characters in the book. I thought it was a realistic portrayal of a dysfunctional family. The characters are flawed but beautifully written.

I listened to the audio book version and I really enjoyed the narrator. I recommend that format but know that since there are so many characters its a little hard to follow at first. Overall, this is a good book and I recommend it!

Characters

This was the book that inspired me to create the character templates since there are so many characters. I hope this helps if you decide to read this book!

Content Warnings

Loss of a parent, loss of a spouse, infidelity, talk of past abortion, complicated and stressful family dynamics, witnessing death via a traffic accident

Who I recommend this book to

This is a great book club pick because there are so many things to discuss. Also, if you love character driven books I think you’ll like this one.

Get the book!

Did this review of All Adults Here for convince you to read it? You can get the book from Bookshop.org here. Please consider ordering it from a Black owned independent bookstore. This list of Black owned independent bookstores accepts online ordering.