May 3

May 3 All Adults Here

Best Audiobooks, Audiobooks, Fiction, Five Star Books, 2020 Best

Score: 5/5 Bookmarks

Thank you to Libro.fm and Penguin Audio for gifting me a review copy of All Adults Here by Emma Straub. I devoured this audiobook in one day. I was just so hooked from the beginning that I didn’t want to stop!

It’s a multigenerational story about parenting, growing up, figuring out who you are and how you relate to everyone else. It’s all of us in some way or another.

I found the characters to be extremely loveable, possibly because of all their flaws and bad decisions. They were real and genuine and had all the same fears I have as a parent. Am I fucking up my kid’s life? Most definitely. The question is, in what unique ways am I doing it? And can I continue to go on, and not let the fear of that paralyze me.

If you enjoyed The Most Fun We Ever Had I think you’ll love this book too, I highly recommend it. And, as always, Emily Rankin does a superb job with the narration. Coincidently (or not perhaps) she also narrated The Most Fun We Ever Had, Before We Were Yours, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, and many more of my favorite audiobooks. Download your own copy by clicking the button below, or get the physical copy here.

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Synopsis:

When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence?

Astrid’s youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is intentionally pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his adult life according to standards no one else shares. But who gets to decide, so many years later, which long-ago lapses were the ones that mattered? Who decides which apologies really count? It might be that only Astrid’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love the most.

In All Adults Here, Emma Straub’s unique alchemy of wisdom, humor, and insight come together in a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood, whether we like them to or not.