All the Lonely People
When her mother dies of cancer, Jaime tries to keep her family intact. Trouble is, they sure put the funk in dysfunctional—her brother is a self-centered blowhard; her sister is an ice queen who has distanced herself emotionally and physically; and they haven’t seen their father since he left the family when they were just kids. Jaime’s husband, Erik, doesn’t have it much better; his father is sitting in a nursing home and doesn’t know who Erik is. After a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner, Jaime decides to advertise on Craigslist for a new family for the holidays. She gets Chris, a pre-op transsexual; Evelyn, a sweet and lonely senior citizen; Paul, who is obsessed with his dachshunds and with the Kiss Army; and Alyssa, a suicidal grad student. The motley crew quickly becomes involved in each other’s lives, lending support and unwavering friendship over the next year’s worth of crises. Riley displays the same gift for creating realistic characters and laugh-out-loud moments as she did in Driving Sideways (2008). Women’s-fiction fans and those who love to compare their own dysfunctional families will get a big kick out of this novel. --Rebecca Vnuk