I adored this short story collection which featured a host of eccentric characters navigating tricky family relationships. I found myself longing to spend more time with nearly every character, and in one sense, I got my wish: the spine that holds these dozen stories together is those featuring Jack and Sadie, whom we visit at different points in their relationship throughout the book. Reading this felt like an emotional roller coaster; McCracken left me breathless as her characters' thoughts and actions elicited giggles and then gasps, often not just in the same story but on the same page. Her style feels deceptively light, as this book goes to hard places, examining depression, suicide, aging, and a host of terrible things happening to children. Yet I didn't want to put it down.

In this novel written as a memoir, Elizabeth McCracken, the author or the character that we feel like is Elizabeth McCracken, shares about her larger-than-life mother, the hero of this book. It’s summer 2019, one year after her mother died, and McCracken has traveled to London where she and her mother traveled to before. She alternates between different stories of her mother’s life, including her experience of disability, and what it’s like without her there. She makes you wish you’d had the chance to know her mother, even as she’s exploring her own grief.