I was shocked at my complete inability to put this book down. It‘s impossible not to fall in love with this family.

“So then, after less than a year of employment, I was jobless. It turned out that it was more than just the food chains that had contracted. People were living in motels and tent cities. The whole economy suddenly felt like a game of musical chairs, and I was convinced I needed to grab a seat, any seat, as fast as I could.” -5

“I inched myself across the room to the bed and climbed up, despite the sparklers behind my eyeballs. The boys let the forlorn puppy in, and when they opened the door they also let the night in, because my fall had taken hours from our lives.”

“During the day, while my sons are in school, I can‘t stop reading about the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, be great Pacific trash gyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species, millennia snuffed out as if they were not precious. I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow satiate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.”

“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression,”

This book was a wonderful short read. Poetic and heartbreaking. It‘s disjointed beginning had me worried but, by the end, it was clear how well executed the novel and its narrative was.