A review by sam_anker_
All Adults Here by Emma Straub

3.0

I almost didn’t read past the first chapter, but I’m glad I did. The book follows the Strick family, only mostly adults unlike the title suggests, and how they move through life. There’s affairs, pregnancy, late life realizations about sexual orientations, and struggling to live up to the expectations of a dead parent. I liked almost all of the characters beyond the matriarch, which I think reflects well on the author. Not every protagonist should be likable. The author did a very good job with a character in the middle of transitioning, and I cried during the chapter about their coming out. My only real issues were that the teenagers in the book were written like 50-year-olds, as no 13 year old is that self aware, and also it seemed like the author was trying to show off that she knew Big Words™ by throwing them in places they didn’t have to be. Sometimes simpler is better. That, and the story was literally split up between like 8 different points of view, very confusing in the beginning.