The Adults

First of all, I love author Alison Espach's writing (see here and here). I'll read anything she writes. That being said, The Adults, her first novel which I just read, was hard to stomach. As always for Espach, the prose was brilliant. Yet this book's content was extremely off-putting to me.

The novel centers on Emily, a girl growing up in Connecticut, and her journey from adolescent to adult. Her peers are awful. The adults in her life are awful. It's one worst case scenario after the next.  Everyone's behavior is despicable, and there don't seem to be any lessons learned. There just aren't enough redeeming scenarios for my liking. The book was painful to get through, but I kept going because of the writing, and because I wanted a happy ending. But as this novel will make clear, you can't always get what you want.

AES