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Summary
Summary
For the Posts, a two-week trip to the island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: it's Franny and Jim's thirty-fifth anniversary, and their daughter has graduated from high school. The sunlit island also promises an escape from the tensions simmering at home. But all does not go according to plan: secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.
Author Notes
Emma Straub is an author, a bookseller, and a staff writer for Rookie. Her fiction and non-fiction works have been published in The Paris Review Daily, Time, and The New York Times. Her novels include Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, Other People We Married, The Vacationers and Modern Lovers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-In this delightful concoction, family and friends come together for two weeks of summer vacation on the island of Mallorca. Franny is a freelance magazine writer about food from different regions. She's currently not speaking to her husband, a magazine editor recently dismissed for sleeping with an employee only a few years older than their daughter, Sylvia. The teen cannot wait to start at Brown University in the fall. All she wants from this vacation is to lose her virginity and try to forget her best friend's betrayal. Cue Joan, the gorgeous local college boy Franny has hired to tutor Sylvia in Spanish. Also in attendance, Franny's best friend of 40 years, Charles, to provide comfort and counsel. Charles and his husband, Lawrence, are waiting to hear whether they've been chosen to adopt a baby boy. Sylvia's older brother Bobby and Bobby's much-older girlfriend, Carmen fly in from Miami. Straub fleshes out all of these characters, effortlessly illuminating their foibles and mistakes, mitigated by the grace of forgiveness and familial understanding. Just as a great recipe is balanced and spiced, so Straub mixes the stress and comedy of a family vacation spent in close quarters to delightful effect.-Angela Carstensen, Convent of the Sacred Heart, New York City (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sieh, a relatively unknown character actress who has appeared in Boardwalk Empire and Orange Is the New Black, steals the show in this audio production, impressing listeners with her wit, humor, and remarkable accents. Straub's novel takes place on the island of Mallorca, where the Post family and some friends have retreated for two weeks of sun, sand, and soul baring. It's challenging to provide believable voices for around a dozen characters in many different stages of life, but Sieh nails them all without a hiccup. She is as adept with Sylvia (the teenage daughter whose epic bouts of sullen eye-rolling mask hidden depths) as she is with Sylvia's brother Bobby, a 28-year-old Peter Pan who can't quite settle into a job or a committed relationship, even though he's brought his older girlfriend Carmen along to the beach. Sieh does an excellent job with Carmen's Cuban-American Miami accent, then perfects the lilt of Sylvia's handsome Spanish teacher, providing the appropriate lisp in his pronunciation of "Barthelona." Add to this the indefatigable purposefulness of the Post matriarch, Franny, and the humor of several other characters, and Sieh's narration makes for winning entertainment. A Riverhead hardcover. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Straub's second novel (Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, 2012) is contained in the two-week vacation of the extended Post family: Franny and Jim, married over 30 years; their teen daughter, Sylvia; twentysomething son Bobby, his girlfriend, Carmen, in tow; and Franny's best friend, Charles, and his husband, Lawrence. Trading one grand island for another, the mainly Manhattanites arrive in Mallorca with, of course, a few secrets tucked in their literal baggage and so begin the games that occur above the plane of the Scrabble board. Jim has suddenly left his beloved magazine job, and not everyone knows the circumstances; Sylvia's excitement to get to Brown might have more to do with leaving home; Carmen wishes Bobby would ask his parents for that favor already; and it's more than work e-mails keeping Lawrence searching for a Wi-Fi signal. Straub masters a constantly changing flow of perspectives as readers wonder who will forgive and be forgiven in this sun-soaked, remote paradise. Spongy and dear, sharply observed and funny, Straub's domestic-drama-goes-abroad is a delightful study of the complexities of family and love, and the many distractions from both.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN THE KINGDOM OF ICE: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides. (Anchor, $16.95.) In June 1881, two years into its Arctic expedition, the U.S.S. Jeannette's hull was crushed by ice, forcing the commander, George Washington De Long (1844-81), and his 32-man crew to abandon ship 1,000 miles north of Siberia. Sides's first-rate narrative recounts the horrors (crude amputations, madness, starvation) in the crew's desperate struggle to survive. LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB, PARIS 1932, by Francine Prose. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) Told in a kaleidoscope of voices and inspired by a 1932 Brassai photograph of a lesbian couple at a Paris nightclub, Prose's novel of love, cross-dressing and espionage centers on a French cabaret performer and racecar driver who betrays her country to the Nazis. JOHN WAYNE: The Life and Legend, by Scott Eyman. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) More than one of Hollywood's most famous actors, Wayne (1907-79) was, and still is, a symbol of America itself: strong, forthright, ready to defend the homestead. Eyman goes behind the screen persona to reveal a man who was exuberant, guileless, even strangely innocent. THE VACATIONERS, by Emma Straub. (Riverhead, $16.) Straub's novel follows a well-heeled Manhattan family, the Posts, and their friends on a two-week vacation in Majorca. It's supposed to be a time of celebration - there's a 35th wedding anniversary, for starters - but their idyll is upended as secrets and rivalries come to light. "For those unable to jet off to a Spanish island this summer, reading 'The Vacationers' may be the next-best thing," Margo Rabb said in the Book Review. SUPREME CITY: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, by Donald L. Miller. (Simon & Schuster, $19.99.) This entertaining history is led by an astonishing cast of characters, including Walter Chrysler and Duke Ellington, who helped turn 1920s New York into the world capital of culture and commerce. In SO WE READ ON: How "The Great Gatsby" Came to Be and Why It Endures (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16), Maureen Corrigan offers fresh perspectives on the Jazz Age novel's debt to noir and its profound commentaries on themes of race, class and gender. COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel. (Vintage International, $15.95.) "I've always seen myself as an empty person, lacking color and identity," says Murakami's forlorn hero, a 36-year-old engineer in Tokyo who embarks on a series of reunions in the hopes of understanding why his tight-knit circle of high school friends suddenly shunned him years earlier. HOTEL FLORIDA: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, by Amanda Vaill. (Picador, $20.) Against the backdrop of a critical moment in history, Vaill traces the tangled wartime destinies of three couples: the bright young photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, the writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, and the devoted press officers Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar. ?
Library Journal Review
The Post family is headed for Mallorca for a two-week vacation. Jim and Frannie should be celebrating their 35th anniversary, but, because of Jim's recent infidelity, they are instead contemplating divorce. Their son, Bobby, is head over heels in debt and comes to ask his parents for a loan. His sister, Sylvia, has just graduated from high school with the goal of having sex for the first time before going off to college to "remake" herself. Frannie's best friend Charles and his husband, Lawrence, come to pass the time while waiting to hear from their adoption agency. The story takes some twists and turns, leaving everyone's life changed at the end. Straub's (Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures) characters are quirky yet recognizable. She captures the conflicted angst of the teenager especially effectively. Well read by Kristen Sieh. VERDICT Recommended. ["An examination of fidelity, passion, and the vagaries of relationships, this is summer reading with some sizzle and seriousness," read the review of the Riverhead hc, LJ 5/1/14.]-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Lib., Providence (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.