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Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.
A summer beach read about a family on their summer vacation. Slightly weightier than standard chick-lit but still easy to read and enough intrigue to keep you turning the pages quickly.
I listened to the audiobook of this and I didn't love it. I just found it a little bland. I finished it last week and I can barely even remember what it was about. It's a family that goes on vacation with issues, and some of the secrets come out. It's one of those that they hint that something is wrong, like the husband had cheated on the wife, so you get hints about it for a while before it comes to light. In the end, everyone is happy. Even though he cheated, they get back together, which annoyed me because even in the book, when it's the husband's perspective, he talks about how nice it was to be with a much younger woman. Maybe I missed the point along the way. The gay couple got a child. The young girl got banged and then ignored. I don't know...I feel like the women weren't treated very well in this book, yet they were content or happy. This just didn't click with me and maybe I missed the message of the whole book. I loved Emma's other book "This Time Tomorrow" so I was really hoping to love this one as well. ( )
I really enjoyed reading about the Post family on vacation. Emma Straub writes a good story, with a warm sense of humor, full of flawed regular people. ( )
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
It is not so much a matter of traveling as of getting away; which of us has not some pain to dull, or some yoke to cast off?
—GEORGE SAND, Winter in Majorca
I'll be the desert island where you can be free I'll be the vulture you can catch and eat
—THE MAGNETIC FIELDS, "Desert Island"
Opdracht
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
For River, with a lifetime of family vacations ahead
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
LEAVING ALWAYS CAME AS A SURPRISE, NO MATTER HOW long the dates had been looming on the calendar.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Having a daughter whose company he actually enjoyed was one of Jim's favorite accomplishments. The odds were against you, in all matters of family planning. You couldn't choose to have a boy or a girl; you couldn't choose to have a child who favored you over the other parent. You could only accept what came along naturally, and Sylvia had done just that, ten years after her brother. Bobby liked to use the word accident, but Jim and Franny preferred the word surprise, like a birthday party filled with balloons.
The back of the house was even better—the swimming pool, which had looked merely serviceable in the single backyard photograph, was in fact divine, a wide blue rectangle tucked into the hillside. A cluster of wooden chaise lounges sat at one end, as if the Posts had walked in on a conversation already in progress.
From the lip of the pool, they could see other houses tucked into the side of the mountain, as small and perfectly shaped as Monopoly pieces, their gleaming faces poking out from a blanket of shifting green trees and craggy rocks.
Jim's vague understanding was that she had so much money that a strict job description was superfluous.
the timing was such that Fran could be counted on to have at least one red-faced scream per day.
Being eighteen was like being made from rubber and cocaine. Sylvia could have stayed up for three more days, easy.
Once Charles arrived, Franny would start laughing the way she had when she was twenty-four, and the rest of them could start setting one another on fire for all she cared. That's what best friends did: ruin people for everyone else. Of course, Franny would have said that Jim had already ruined everything.
"How's it going? With Jim, I mean." "Oh, you know," Franny started, but didn't know how to finish the sentence. "Bad. Bad, bad, bad. I can't look at him without wanting to cut off his penis."
So much of being a good friend was knowing when to keep your mouth shut.
A small airplane flew across the sky, a trail of white smoke behind it, a blank skywritten message.
Franny was Franny, like always, the central figure in her own solar system, the maypole around which the rest of the world had to dance and twirl.
Franny had put it like this: Her father had slept with someone, and it was a Problem that they were trying to figure out, as if the whole thing could be solved with a giant calculator.
Sylvia sat in her chair at the kitchen table and watched them silently spar. She wondered if it had always been this way, or whether it was only her more mature eyes that recognized the cold breeze between her mother and father.
"Let's go inside," she said. "I'm finding all this sunshine very depressing."
"It's like this," Franny said, and then kept her mouth shut for a beat. "It's like nothing. It's like I want to punch him in the eyeball almost as much as I want him to actually apologize. I can't tell you how many times I've truly considered murdering him in his sleep." "So you're not mad?"
Friendships were tricky things, especially friendships as old as theirs was. Nudity was nothing more than a collection of hard-earned scars and marks. Love was a given, uncomplicated by sex or vows, but honesty was always waiting there, ready to capsize the steady boat.
"Marriage is hard. Relationships are hard. You know that I'm on your side, whatever your side is, but that's the truth. We've all done things."
"Secrets are no fun for anyone."
Life would be so much more interesting if one could ask all the questions one wanted to and expect honest answers.
"I do not understand the Internet," Charles said. "It's a giant void." Jim agreed. "A limitless void. Hey, Syl," he said. "How's it going over there?" Sylvia looked up. She had the crazed expression of a child who'd stared directly into the sun, blinking and temporarily blind.
"Maybe she'll drown," Jim said, appearing next to Franny. "Would that make things better or worse?"
Was it better to be a hypocrite or a liar? Jim wasn't sure.
Madison Vance had appeared like a lump of kryptonite, as suddenly as if she'd fallen out of the sky. She was forward, and brave, and when she told Jim she wasn't wearing any underwear, he shouldn't have raised his eyebrows in amusement. He should have called human resources and then tucked himself into a ball under his desk like an air-raid drill.
The lit-up houses on the other side of the valley were like polka dots in the darkness. Every so often, one would turn black, or another would brighten, stars dying and coming back to life.
"Your mother raised you like a baby manatee—she let you stay close for a year, tops, and then pushed you out into the ocean."
she'd been telling him that for years, that life was lived outside, on the move, out of one's comfort zone.
Sometimes love was one-sided.
"Rock and roll," she said, apropos of nothing but her own beating heart.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Franny wrapped both of her arms around Jim's right one, her grip firm and ready for any turbulence ahead.
Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.
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