All Adults Here

Astrid Strick's suppressed memory from her early parenting days decades ago is shaken free when she observes a school bus accident in the middle of town. Astrid discovers all of a sudden that she was not nearly the parent she had believed she had been to her three adult children. To what end, though?

The youngest son of Astrid is straying, inattentive, and doing his own parenting errors. Her daughter is fighting to let go of her own youth while purposefully becoming pregnant. Furthermore, her oldest child seems to hold himself to a set of adult norms that no one else does. But who gets to choose which past transgressions were significant enough to be addressed so many years later? Who determines what excuses are really acceptable? Perhaps only Astrid's thirteen-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand what it takes to have the guts to be honest with the people you care about the most.

All Adults Here is a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, ageing parents, high school boyfriends, mean girls in middle school, the effects of birth order for the rest of our lives, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood whether we like it or not. Emma Straub's unique alchemy of wisdom, humour, and insight come together in this compelling novel.