Category: Books

In 2011, one of the most destructive tornadoes to hit the U.S. touched down at 5:34 p.m. in Joplin, Missouri. Although the area had been under a tornado watch for more than four hours and tornado warnings were issued shortly after 5 o’clock, 161 people died and more than a thousand were injured.

In the aftermath, researchers wanted to learn not only all they could about the tornado’s formation, but also why, with ample warning time, there were so many casualties. Among others, they interviewed a man who “was aware that storms were likely, but wanted to get something to eat,” writes Thomas E. Weber in Cloud Warriors, his examination of the past and future of weather forecasting. The man — who was turned away by one restaurant but found another that let him in and served him with the storm bearing down — was lucky to survive despite his “optimism bias,” the idea that when bad things happen, they likely won’t happen to you.

Optimism bias is but one of the challenges of the people who try to keep us safe from tornados, hurricanes, flooding and other catastrophic weather. Weber calls them “cloud warriors,” people whose job is ostensibly to forecast the weather but who have a larger purpose: keeping us safe from Mother Nature.

“Weather predictions are impressively good, so much so that their accuracy may surprise you.” Weber writes, noting that today’s five-day forecasts are as good as a 24-hour forecast was in 1980. While everything from artificial intelligence to the weather balloons that the National Weather Service launches every day (in every state) will continue to improve forecasting, forecasts have limited value if people don’t heed them, which is why Weber, a journalist, wants everyone to improve their weather literacy, especially about four types of weather-related threats: tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat and hurricanes.

For the tornado chapter, he travels to Norman, Oklahoma, home to the National Weather Center, which, in addition to being populated by very intense and learned meteorologists, pays homage to the Twister movies with its Flying Cow Cafe. Like the stars of those films, Weber goes storm chasing in a tricked-out truck but doesn’t encounter anything more exciting than an ominous wall cloud (a sign of potential tornado formation) and some aggressive hail. (We do learn, however, that the Twister movies didn’t exaggerate the storm chasers on the plains of Oklahoma — a dozen or so companies will take tourists’ money in exchange for putting them in harm’s way.)

Fire isn’t weather, but is driven by wind, which is why Weber travels to an emergency operations center in San Diego to look into how meteorologists and firefighters try to keep people safe from fires that burn at up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and spread at six miles an hour. In this chapter, he examines the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of Paradise, California, in 2018, explains the infamous Santa Ana winds, and delves into why so much of the country is indifferent to the danger of wildlife. He quotes one meteorologist who says: “They don’t comprehend what happens when you have low humidity and wind on a fire. Or when you have a drought or a normal dry summer, what that does to vegetation. They know what it’s like to be thirsty, but they don’t understand what it’s like for vegetation to be thirsty.”

Those of us who pay even fleeting attention to meteorologists like Dave Epstein on social media are familiar with the “European models” that compete with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Strangely enough, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is best-known for its hurricane models, even though hurricanes are rare in the 23 nations and 12 “cooperating states” that it serves.

To learn more, Weber takes us to the town of Reading, England, where the ECMWF’s supercomputers sit; they can, he tells us, conduct more than four quadrillion calculations per second. And yet, “They’re just rows of big metal cabinets; they look like a bunch of refrigerators placed side by side.”

While many of the questions that Webster poses are really interesting — for example, how do you get emergency weather notifications to the Amish, who shun technology — the book often lacks electricity, it moves sluggishly, bogged down by an unfortunate impulse embedded in every journalist’s DNA: to include every last piece of information you gathered in telling a story.

Therefore, when we learn about why accurate weather forecasting is so important to the people launching delivery drones at Walmart, we are tempted to put the book down and go to the Walmart website and try to order by drone, which is much more exciting. In other words, Weber tells us interesting stories, but not always in the most interesting way. This is not necessarily his fault. He is, after all, interviewing the geekiest of weather geeks and is one himself, being one of your fellow Americans who have their own personal weather station installed in their backyard so they can, among other things, get a phone notification if it starts to rain.

Me, I’m still astounded that the weather app on my phone can announce that it will start to rain in 14 minutes and will rain for 24 minutes, and pretty much be right. Weber tries to explain how that happens, and frankly I still don’t fully get it after 200-plus pages. I’m not fully convinced that I need to be as weather literate as Weber and his sources, so long as my iPhone is. Cloud Warriors, though well-reported, may be a deeper dive into the subject than most readers want or need. B

Featured Photo: Cloud Warriors, by Thomas E. Weber

Class Clown, by Dave Barry (Simon & Schuster, 244 pages)

One thing that has been lost with the decline of newspapers is the syndicated humor columnist that most everyone knew of and read. For three decades, one of those was Dave Barry, whose home base was, and still is, the Miami Herald.

For many people, reading Barry’s “year in review” columns was a December tradition. He’s still writing them; it’s just that with paywalls and such, they seem harder to come by. (“Some readers look forward to it; others view it as an opportunity to inform me that I used to be funnier,” Barry says of the column now.)

At 77, somehow still possessed of a twenty-something head of hair, Barry has written a memoir to add to his oeuvre, which is populated with titles like Dave Barry Turns 40, Dave Barry Turns 50 and I’ll Mature When I’m Dead. It’s hard to imagine that there are any stories he hasn’t told, and sure enough, many make encores here. (Stop him if you already know he’s been in a rock band with Stephen King, but he’ll probably keep going.)

As someone who was reading Barry in the 1980s, when he was new to the Herald and newspapers were still a big deal, I feared this new book would feel overly familiar, like so much tired schtick turned out by long-in-the-tooth authors unwilling to hang up the typewriter. But he surprised me.

Not that there isn’t a certain predictability about Barry’s style and delivery; the surprise was in what he was willing to reveal when he wasn’t working to be funny.

He wallops us in the beginning with a story that promises to be boring — the title is simply “Mom and Dad” and he begins it, “Like so many members of the Baby Boom generation, I started out as a baby.”

Barry recounts his formative years in affluent Armonk, New York, where his own sense of humor was cultivated with decidedly quirky parents. Just when we think this is an idyllic story of shiny happy people having more fun than us, Barry reveals the problems his parents struggled with as they grew older. Juxtaposed with the wholesome upbringing the Barry children were given, the end of the parents’ stories is jarring and deeply poignant, reminiscent of some of the darker family stories told by the humorist David Sedaris. It’s unexpected, and reminds us that so often there is sadness behind the veil that funny people have to try to overcome.

After high school, he studied English at a (then) all-male college founded by Quakers, Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he says he “read roughly a third of the way through many great literary works.” (When he later escaped the draft during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector, he says that Society of Friends connection may have benefited his case.) It was at Haverford where he was first published, assigned to write an article about the opening of a Nixon for President office. “As a long-haired, pot-smoking hippie,” he had no interest in the subject and submitted a humor column, which may or may not have been published (he doesn’t remember).

Not knowing what else to do with an English degree, he flirted with straight-up journalism, even working as an intern with Congressional Quarterly, got hired as a reporter for a daily newspaper, and went on to work for the Associated Press, all the while writing humor columns when he could. Unhappy with the constraints of the AP, he quit that job to work at one of the most humorless writing jobs out there: that of a business-writing consultant, but he continued to work as a freelancer, and when a humorous piece he wrote on natural childbirth, focusing on the birth of his son, ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer, his humor writing career really took off. Barry no longer had to pitch his columns; editors were asking him to write for them.

Barry sails through the rest of his career with stories studded with famous people and irate readers and snippets of his columns and articles. There have been so many that unless you’re a 30-year subscriber to theHerald, many are fresh and riotously funny, despite their age. There is, for example, an excerpt of an “interview” Barry did with then Florida Gov. Bob Graham, in which the governor, as Barry puts it, “flipped a switch and went into Zany Mode,” and the two bantered as if they were on a late-night show.
“Barry: What can the state do about harmonica safety? I don’t know if you have any idea how many Floridians die every year in harmonica accidents….

Graham: Well last year we actually made some substantial improvement. In 1981, there were four people who died of harmonica accidents. Now actually, I think it’s only fair to count three of them, because the fourth one was actually, I would say it was more of a swimming pool accident.”

It goes on, gloriously, and it makes you long for the day — of what, I’m not sure. Newspapers? Politicians taking themselves less seriously? There is something in Barry’s career that hasn’t been replaced by a newcomer, let’s just say. The same when we lost Erma Bombeck, Lewis Grizzard, Art Buchwald and so many others.

Barry subtitles this book “the memoirs of a professional wiseass,” drawing on his mission in high school, which he says was wiseassery. He had a friend with whom he basically pranked his way through school without serious consequence. He recalls life events with the nostalgia of the Boomer he is, and sometimes he almost seems Forrest Gump-like as he romps his way through historic events, growing ever more famous, writing screenplays and novels, and even winning a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Class Clown is unlikely to win any elite literary prizes, but Barry proves that on the cusp of 80 he can still make America laugh. B

Featured Photo: Class Clown by Dave Barry

Quirky isn’t usually my thing, and Annie Hartnett’s latest novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is most decidedly quirky (just ask Pancakes, the death-predicting cat). The events are bizarre and often tragic, and the characters are eccentric. But at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.

The story starts with a slew of those bizarre events that ultimately unite main character PJ Halliday, a 63-year-old lottery winner with a long history of drinking and letting people down, with his estranged brother’s young grandchildren, Luna and Ollie.

PJ is not about to let their sudden existence in his life stop him from his latest endeavor, a road trip from his home in Massachusetts to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, where he plans to woo his high-school crush, recently single again after losing her spouse. (PJ learns about that in the newspaper obits, not because he’s been in contact with her, so this visit will be a fun surprise for her.)

Also joining the trip, begrudgingly, is PJ’s 20-something daughter, Sophie, who is simmering with decades’ worth of anger toward her often absent alcoholic father. She has been tasked by her mother — PJ’s ex-wife, Ivy — to take care of him while she is away in Alaska with her fiance, Fred. So Sophie feels obligated to act as babysitter, for Ollie and Luna, and also for her dad.

The motley road-trip crew is rounded out by Pancakes, who has recently wandered into PJ’s life after a stint as a therapy cat at a nursing home.

If PJ were written in any other way, I think I would have hated him as a character. But somehow Hartnett makes me want to root for him. He, pitifully, thinks of Ivy and Fred as his best friends. He goes to their house for breakfast every morning, and he’s devastated when they don’t invite him on their trip.

When Ivy and Fred leave, PJ decides to quit drinking, again.

“PJ had never had a detox as bad as that one, not even when he had to go to prison for six weeks for the drunk driving, but once the detoxing was over, PJ had a new outlook. … When Ivy and Fred got home in September, he could be a new man. He wanted to be a man who was worthy of being their best man. Without the booze, PJ started feeling hopeful.”

It’s kind of hard not to feel for an old man who is so lonely and accepting of his own faults that he settles for being the third wheel in his ex-wife’s relationship. He’s lived his fair share of tragic events, too, which we start to learn more about as the road trip gets underway.

But for every moment or memory of darkness, there is also light, in the form of sweet moments between characters, hope for better things to come and the perfect amount of well-placed fatalistic humor.

Take, for instance, when Pancakes jumps out of a window of the moving car as Sophie and the kids try to track down a missing PJ. Ollie comments that Pancakes is “suicidal without Uncle PJ.” In fact, Pancakes is pulling a Lassie, leading the crew to PJ, who had been hit by a car while walking back to the motel from a bar after having just one drink and deciding he needed to go back to his family. The car was driven, ironically, by the man he’d been chatting with in the bar whose sad story was that he’d killed his wife when driving drunk. PJ survives the accident with minor injuries, but the man does not.

Emotions run high throughout the trip, as PJ battles his own inner demons, Sophie grapples with her dad’s still-not-great behavior and the kids adjust to their new reality as orphans — although Luna is having none of that. She is convinced her real dad is a famous actor who used to live in their town and whom her mom had always said she’d briefly dated. Luna wants to track him down and make him take a paternity test. This would get PJ off the hook as guardian, so he agrees to veer off course for Luna’s heartbreaking endeavor to find a family.

It’s all very sad, but also funny and genuine. The story could have been depressing, but it’s not. The characters are all well-developed and unique, and PJ’s growth feels honest and real. He’s somehow a loveable underdog, despite his constant lapses in judgment.

The Tender Hearts the title is referring to, presumably, is Tender Hearts Retirement Community, as they are literally on the road driving to that destination. But The Road to Tender Hearts could also describe the path PJ is taking to rebuild his heart with compassion and empathy. It could be the softening of Sophie’s heart as she sees her dad trying to be better and do better. It could be the unwitting journey PJ is taking into Ollie and Luna’s tender hearts.

I’m glad I didn’t let my thoughts of “this is so weird” as I read the first few pages stop me from taking this journey with them. A-

Featured Photo: The Ghost Lab by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Quirky isn’t usually my thing, and Annie Hartnett’s latest novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is most decidedly quirky (just ask Pancakes, the death-predicting cat). The events are bizarre and often tragic, and the characters are eccentric. But at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.

The story starts with a slew of those bizarre events that ultimately unite main character PJ Halliday, a 63-year-old lottery winner with a long history of drinking and letting people down, with his estranged brother’s young grandchildren, Luna and Ollie.

PJ is not about to let their sudden existence in his life stop him from his latest endeavor, a road trip from his home in Massachusetts to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, where he plans to woo his high-school crush, recently single again after losing her spouse. (PJ learns about that in the newspaper obits, not because he’s been in contact with her, so this visit will be a fun surprise for her.)

Also joining the trip, begrudgingly, is PJ’s 20-something daughter, Sophie, who is simmering with decades’ worth of anger toward her often absent alcoholic father. She has been tasked by her mother — PJ’s ex-wife, Ivy — to take care of him while she is away in Alaska with her fiance, Fred. So Sophie feels obligated to act as babysitter, for Ollie and Luna, and also for her dad.

The motley road-trip crew is rounded out by Pancakes, who has recently wandered into PJ’s life after a stint as a therapy cat at a nursing home.

If PJ were written in any other way, I think I would have hated him as a character. But somehow Hartnett makes me want to root for him. He, pitifully, thinks of Ivy and Fred as his best friends. He goes to their house for breakfast every morning, and he’s devastated when they don’t invite him on their trip.

When Ivy and Fred leave, PJ decides to quit drinking, again.

“PJ had never had a detox as bad as that one, not even when he had to go to prison for six weeks for the drunk driving, but once the detoxing was over, PJ had a new outlook. … When Ivy and Fred got home in September, he could be a new man. He wanted to be a man who was worthy of being their best man. Without the booze, PJ started feeling hopeful.”

It’s kind of hard not to feel for an old man who is so lonely and accepting of his own faults that he settles for being the third wheel in his ex-wife’s relationship. He’s lived his fair share of tragic events, too, which we start to learn more about as the road trip gets underway.

But for every moment or memory of darkness, there is also light, in the form of sweet moments between characters, hope for better things to come and the perfect amount of well-placed fatalistic humor.

Take, for instance, when Pancakes jumps out of a window of the moving car as Sophie and the kids try to track down a missing PJ. Ollie comments that Pancakes is “suicidal without Uncle PJ.” In fact, Pancakes is pulling a Lassie, leading the crew to PJ, who had been hit by a car while walking back to the motel from a bar after having just one drink and deciding he needed to go back to his family. The car was driven, ironically, by the man he’d been chatting with in the bar whose sad story was that he’d killed his wife when driving drunk. PJ survives the accident with minor injuries, but the man does not.

Emotions run high throughout the trip, as PJ battles his own inner demons, Sophie grapples with her dad’s still-not-great behavior and the kids adjust to their new reality as orphans — although Luna is having none of that. She is convinced her real dad is a famous actor who used to live in their town and whom her mom had always said she’d briefly dated. Luna wants to track him down and make him take a paternity test. This would get PJ off the hook as guardian, so he agrees to veer off course for Luna’s heartbreaking endeavor to find a family.

It’s all very sad, but also funny and genuine. The story could have been depressing, but it’s not. The characters are all well-developed and unique, and PJ’s growth feels honest and real. He’s somehow a loveable underdog, despite his constant lapses in judgment.

The Tender Hearts the title is referring to, presumably, is Tender Hearts Retirement Community, as they are literally on the road driving to that destination. But The Road to Tender Hearts could also describe the path PJ is taking to rebuild his heart with compassion and empathy. It could be the softening of Sophie’s heart as she sees her dad trying to be better and do better. It could be the unwitting journey PJ is taking into Ollie and Luna’s tender hearts.

I’m glad I didn’t let my thoughts of “this is so weird” as I read the first few pages stop me from taking this journey with them. A-

Featured Photo: The Road To Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett

Madeline Hill wasn’t looking to expand her family when a stranger in a PT Cruiser pulled up to her farm stand in Tennessee and announced that he was her half-brother. At 32, she’d settled into a life she’d built with her mother after her father left them 20 years earlier with no explanation and no future contact. Maybe it wasn’t her best life, but it also wasn’t a bad one. They ran an organic farm that had won acclaim for their meat, eggs, produce and cheese, and had even been featured in magazines. True, it was a largely solitary life, but Mad, as she was known, was comfortable in it. A sibling was not part of her life plan.

Enter Reuben Hill, or Rube, as he is known. The stranger in the PT Cruiser tells Mad that they shared a father, and he had a whole other life in Boston before he ran out on Rube’s family and took up with Mad’s mom. As an adult, Rube wanted to learn more about his father, and so he hired a private investigator who found a mysterious pattern: The man that Rube knew as Chuck Hill, a New England insurance salesman and author of detective novels, had reinvented himself as Charles Hill, a organic farmer in the deep South. But he hadn’t stopped there. There were, apparently, other families that their dad created and left.

In another writer’s hands, this storyline might be overwrought, but in the hands of Kevin Wilson, it’s comedy gold. In Run for the Hills, Wilson’s sixth novel, he sends Mad and Rube on the world’s weirdest road trip, in which they trace their father’s domestic settlements from Tennessee to California and meet their other half-siblings, in the hopes of figuring out what, exactly, their father was thinking, as he continually reinvented himself at the expense of others.

It’s an absurd story, as absurd as the PT Cruiser that Rube showed up in for a road trip. (It’s what the rental-car company gave him, he explains to a bemused Mad.) But it has a raw and poignant center — how this man had shaped his children’s lives, not by his presence, but by his absence, as Wilson writes.

Mad and Rube had built successful lives for themselves, despite the trauma that their father’s abrupt disappearance had inflicted upon their families; Rube had even followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a mystery writer. Another sibling that they tracked down was a star college basketball — in the iteration of himself that the father gave that family, he had been a basketball coach who went by the name Chip Hill.

Curiously, despite the coldness of his departures, when he was living with the families their father was, by all accounts, a good father. Which made his willingness to abruptly remove himself from his children’s lives all the more a mystery.

What caused him to behave that way — and where he is now — are the central questions driving the narrative of Run for the Hills, but it’s the blooming relationships between the quirky half-siblings that give the story its heart. Mad at first is suspicious of Rube and his motives, and reluctant to even invite him into her house as a guest. Guests, she thinks, are an inconvenience: “They showed up and created work for you. They asked about your feelings, your day. They asked if maybe you had a beer in the fridge.They asked if you could adjust the air-conditioning just, like, two degrees. They asked if you knew the location of any legal papers that might speak to the true identity of the father you had not seen in over twenty years.”

Rube, whose mother recently died, is an excruciatingly polite and lonely man who wears his longing for a family on his Oxford shirt sleeve. He is gay and has been in relationships, but like Mad, had never married and is afraid of being left again. “Half of it is that Dad messed me up by leaving. And half of it is that my mom messed me up by staying but being so damn sad that I never forgot about it,” he tells Mad. He is hoping that he can make some lasting connection with these half-siblings, while Mad is hoping just to figure out the mystery and get home to her real life as soon as possible.

They track down the third child, Pepper (who goes by Pep — their father was very fond of nicknames) at the University of Oklahoma, where she was about to play in a championship game. Then it’s off to find a son in Salt Lake City, before the crowded car ultimately crosses into California, where they hope to find the father of them all.

Interspersed throughout the novel are descriptions of video the father had taken of all the children — Pep playing basketball, Mad feeding chickens, Rube playing with a paper airplane. The interludes are meant to show us Hill’s loving interactions with his children, adding to the mystery, and their meaning is more clear near the end of the book. But they don’t work — they are distractions to the natural flow of the story. As is Wilson’s inexplicable fondness for the word “offered” as a synonym for “said.” There are more offerings in this book than at a tent revival in the deep South.

But these are small quibbles with a genuinely fun novel that strikes the right balance between poignancy and comedy, no small task given the subject matter. Wilson has famously written about family dysfunction in his other novels, which include The Family Fang (made into a movie), Nothing to See Here and Now is Not the Time to Panic. If Hollywood options this too, I’ll be at the theater on opening day. A- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream, by Nicholas Morgenstern

Madeline Hill wasn’t looking to expand her family when a stranger in a PT Cruiser pulled up to her farm stand in Tennessee and announced that he was her half-brother. At 32, she’d settled into a life she’d built with her mother after her father left them 20 years earlier with no explanation and no future contact. Maybe it wasn’t her best life, but it also wasn’t a bad one. They ran an organic farm that had won acclaim for their meat, eggs, produce and cheese, and had even been featured in magazines. True, it was a largely solitary life, but Mad, as she was known, was comfortable in it. A sibling was not part of her life plan.

Enter Reuben Hill, or Rube, as he is known. The stranger in the PT Cruiser tells Mad that they shared a father, and he had a whole other life in Boston before he ran out on Rube’s family and took up with Mad’s mom. As an adult, Rube wanted to learn more about his father, and so he hired a private investigator who found a mysterious pattern: The man that Rube knew as Chuck Hill, a New England insurance salesman and author of detective novels, had reinvented himself as Charles Hill, a organic farmer in the deep South. But he hadn’t stopped there. There were, apparently, other families that their dad created and left.

In another writer’s hands, this storyline might be overwrought, but in the hands of Kevin Wilson, it’s comedy gold. In Run for the Hills, Wilson’s sixth novel, he sends Mad and Rube on the world’s weirdest road trip, in which they trace their father’s domestic settlements from Tennessee to California and meet their other half-siblings, in the hopes of figuring out what, exactly, their father was thinking, as he continually reinvented himself at the expense of others.

It’s an absurd story, as absurd as the PT Cruiser that Rube showed up in for a road trip. (It’s what the rental-car company gave him, he explains to a bemused Mad.) But it has a raw and poignant center — how this man had shaped his children’s lives, not by his presence, but by his absence, as Wilson writes.

Mad and Rube had built successful lives for themselves, despite the trauma that their father’s abrupt disappearance had inflicted upon their families; Rube had even followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a mystery writer. Another sibling that they tracked down was a star college basketball — in the iteration of himself that the father gave that family, he had been a basketball coach who went by the name Chip Hill.

Curiously, despite the coldness of his departures, when he was living with the families their father was, by all accounts, a good father. Which made his willingness to abruptly remove himself from his children’s lives all the more a mystery.

What caused him to behave that way — and where he is now — are the central questions driving the narrative of Run for the Hills, but it’s the blooming relationships between the quirky half-siblings that give the story its heart. Mad at first is suspicious of Rube and his motives, and reluctant to even invite him into her house as a guest. Guests, she thinks, are an inconvenience: “They showed up and created work for you. They asked about your feelings, your day. They asked if maybe you had a beer in the fridge.They asked if you could adjust the air-conditioning just, like, two degrees. They asked if you knew the location of any legal papers that might speak to the true identity of the father you had not seen in over twenty years.”

Rube, whose mother recently died, is an excruciatingly polite and lonely man who wears his longing for a family on his Oxford shirt sleeve. He is gay and has been in relationships, but like Mad, had never married and is afraid of being left again. “Half of it is that Dad messed me up by leaving. And half of it is that my mom messed me up by staying but being so damn sad that I never forgot about it,” he tells Mad. He is hoping that he can make some lasting connection with these half-siblings, while Mad is hoping just to figure out the mystery and get home to her real life as soon as possible.

They track down the third child, Pepper (who goes by Pep — their father was very fond of nicknames) at the University of Oklahoma, where she was about to play in a championship game. Then it’s off to find a son in Salt Lake City, before the crowded car ultimately crosses into California, where they hope to find the father of them all.

Interspersed throughout the novel are descriptions of video the father had taken of all the children — Pep playing basketball, Mad feeding chickens, Rube playing with a paper airplane. The interludes are meant to show us Hill’s loving interactions with his children, adding to the mystery, and their meaning is more clear near the end of the book. But they don’t work — they are distractions to the natural flow of the story. As is Wilson’s inexplicable fondness for the word “offered” as a synonym for “said.” There are more offerings in this book than at a tent revival in the deep South.

But these are small quibbles with a genuinely fun novel that strikes the right balance between poignancy and comedy, no small task given the subject matter. Wilson has famously written about family dysfunction in his other novels, which include The Family Fang (made into a movie), Nothing to See Here and Now is Not the Time to Panic. If Hollywood options this too, I’ll be at the theater on opening day. A- —Jennifer Graham