The struggle for belonging and self-acceptance drives this Midwestern family\u2019s mini-dramas in the 2010s. The humorously upbeat narrative alternates between the third-person perspectives of three generations of Jewish women: Mona Grossman, her teenage daughter Grace, and Mona\u2019s grandmother, Esther \u201cBubby\u201d Rosenfeld. Mona, a full-time homemaker, struggles to reconnect with Grace, and to save her marriage with Rich. Her 20th high school reunion forces her to take a good hard look at herself, and to reassess her priorities and her goals. Meanwhile, high school freshman Grace resents both her controlling mother and her school\u2019s popular cliques. She breaks free of her mother\u2019s hold on her, and she overcomes her social anxiety by joining the band Green Light as a guitarist. After Mona, Grace, and Rich persuade Esther to move to an assisted living facility called Enliven, Esther befriends its other residents. While Esther\u2019s judgment is not consistently reliable, she\u2019s ultimately portrayed as a wise old woman who manages to reconnect Mona and Grace, encouraging them to accept their own selves and each other. While Grace rapidly morphs from an awkward and inhibited teenager into a confident and empowered guitarist, Mona gradually spirals downward into anxiety and stagnation. She was voted \u201cmost likely to succeed\u201d in high school, but Mona can no longer keep it all together, as signified by the accidental spillage of the contents of her purse at the reunion. By contrast, Esther quickly accepts her relocation to Enliven. She experiences neither Grace\u2019s growing pains nor Mona\u2019s ambivalence about high school glory days. Yet, as the title of Act II states, Esther continues to learn that \u201cThings Aren\u2019t Always What They Seem.\u201d Although the alternation between the Mona, Grace, and Esther chapters produces a rapid page-turner, these different narrative strands keep the novel from feeling focused. The novel could also benefit from greater variation in the different characters\u2019 sections, which read too similarly despite their generational differences.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The struggle for belonging and self-acceptance drives this Midwestern family\u2019s mini-dramas in the 2010s. The humorously upbeat narrative alternates between the third-person perspectives of three generations of Jewish women: Mona Grossman, her teenage daughter Grace, and Mona\u2019s grandmother, Esther \u201cBubby\u201d Rosenfeld. Mona, a full-time homemaker, struggles to reconnect with Grace, and to save her marriage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7663"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}