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An eccentrically fun family vacation, with far more style and spunk than your average beach read.

The Vacationers by Emma Straub (Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures) is peopled by charming, funny, expertly portrayed characters who feel very real and yet slightly fantastical.

The Post family is headed from Manhattan to Mallorca for a two-week vacation, ostensibly to celebrate: Franny and Jim are approaching their 35th anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has just graduated from high school. Joining them will be their son, Bobby, with his girlfriend, Carmen, and Franny’s BFF Charles and his husband, Lawrence. However, Jim has recently left his decades-long career at Gallant magazine amidst shame and scandal, and his transgressions at work have followed him home. Sylvia’s big goal of the summer is to lose her virginity before starting college in the fall. Charles and Lawrence’s is to adopt a baby–a plan they haven’t yet shared with the Posts. Bobby and Carmen are on uneven ground; they have a secret to break to his parents, and it doesn’t help that the Posts have never liked Carmen. More secrets and scandals, new and old, will come to light under the Spanish sun.

Straub’s greatest strengths are her endearingly quirky protagonists and a plot with more twists than a European mountain road, but her secondary characters are also cleverly wrought. The Posts’ absent hostess, Gemma, is Charles’s second-best friend; Franny tries not to let that annoy her. Sylvia’s local Spanish tutor, Joan (“pronounced Joe-ahhhn”), is a delectable temptation for both Sylvia and Franny, but it’s a retired tennis pro who really turns Franny’s head. Luckily, a motorcycle-riding pediatrician becomes Jim’s ally in trying to re-win his wife’s heart. Despite the considerable dysfunction of this family, this tale about them has a surprisingly happy ending.

This review originally ran in the May 30, 2014 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: domestic fiction, misc fiction, Shelf Awareness |