I’m not sure anyone has accurately pinned down the definition of beach read, but it almost certainly involves a book that’s so engrossing the reader doesn’t notice how uncomfortable it is to read on the beach—the sun in your eyes, the sand in your bathing suit. This summer, I’ve been enjoying books that center on family drama; it’s easy to get swept up into group dynamics stretching back decades, and if the narrative voice hits the sweet spot of withholding and confiding information, it can feel like you’re having a good gossip session.
The family in Grant Ginder’s Let’s Not Do That Again (Holt, April 5) consists of Nancy Harrison, who represents the Upper West Side of Manhattan in Congress and is now running for Senate; her son, Nick, who teaches at NYU and is writing a musical about Joan Didion; and her daughter, Greta, who opens the book with a boom when she throws a bottle of champagne through the window of her mother’s favorite restaurant in Paris—and, of course, winds up all over Fox News. It turns out that Greta has been pissed off at Nancy for years, and when she met a gorgeous French fascist on a gaming site, it didn’t take much for him to convince her to move to Paris and try to blow up her mother’s career. Will Nick go to Paris to try to find Greta even though he’s just met an amazingly nice guy and seems to be starting a relationship? Will Greta realize the French guy is just using her? Is Nancy actually a hero or a villain—and is it possible to be either of those things to your children? Our review says Ginder is “characteristically insightful on sibling and parent-child relationships,” and you’ll zip along to find out whether Nancy wins her election and—more important—if the three Harrisons are still speaking to each other at the end.
In The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon, May 31), Salo and Johanna Oppenheimer went for IVF after years of unsuccessfully trying to have children. Three embryos were implanted in Johanna, and they all stuck, leading nine months later to the fractious triplets Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally. But there was one more embryo that the Oppenheimers chose to freeze, and years later, as her children are ready to go off to college and Johanna is forced to acknowledge that her family life isn’t the picture of happiness, she decides to thaw that single embryo and bring another child into the mix. As the titular latecomer, Phoebe is fascinated by what happened in her family before she arrived, and she manages to poke into all the dark corners and uncover all their secrets—and they’re good ones.
Two recent books peer inside the kitchens of family restaurants: The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang (Norton, Feb. 1) and Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close (Knopf, April 26). Both feature children who stay close to home to work in the restaurants and children who leave—though whether leaving or staying is more rebellious is a matter of perspective. As in Let’s Not Do That Again, where politics is the family business, we get to observe the details of an insular work world and see how it interacts with the family dynamics.
Lastly, in Fellowship Point (Marysue Rucci Books/Scribner, July 5), a group of Philadelphia Quaker families spend more than a century of summers on a Maine peninsula. As their octogenarian scions, Agnes Lee and Polly Wister, face mortality and the need to decide the best way to preserve the land in the future, we peer backward in time to their families of origin and also get a leisurely visit with their current families, both born and chosen.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
