Who knows you better: you or your best friend? Close friends Fiona and Jane—or Jane and Fiona—are constant presences in each other’s lives, sometimes from afar, sometimes in each other’s faces. From childhood through early adulthood, the two Taiwanese American young women scramble though the obstacle courses of their lives, each negotiating complicated family circumstances and carrying the weight of secrets kept from them and secrets they keep from others.
The single mother of a mixed-race college student and a thriving business owner with a troubled daughter clash over a historic oak tree on their property line and the blossoming romance between their children.
Twelve-year-old Eddie Adler is flying with his family from New York City to Los Angeles, a temporary relocation for his mother's television writing job. As he and his brother fight over who gets the window seat, their parents worry how the boys will cope with the move. The 216 passengers aboard their plane include a soldier returning from Afghanistan, an unexpectedly pregnant woman hoping for an engagement ring from her new boyfriend, and a dying tycoon.
An audacious wonder of a novel about baseball and a future America,. The time: Some thirty-five years hence. The place: AutoAmerica--governed by "Aunt Nettie," an iBurrito of AI algorithms and the internet, in a land half under water. The people: Divided into the angelfair "Netted," whose fate it is to have jobs and live on high ground, and the mostly coppertoned "Surplus," whose jobs have been stripped and whose sole duty now is to consume, living in plastic houses that talk and multi-colored houseboats at the water's edge. Neither group is happy.
Sometimes life isn't as simple as heroes and villains.
For Zelda, a twenty-one-year-old Viking enthusiast who lives with her older brother, Gert, life is best lived with some basic rules:
1. A smile means "thank you for doing something small that I liked."
2. Fist bumps and dabs = respect.
3. Strange people are not appreciated in her home.
4. Tomatoes must go in the middle of the sandwich and not get the bread wet.
5. Sometimes the most important things don't fit on lists.
A literature professor tries to rediscover who she is after the sudden death of her husband, even as a series of family and political jolts force her to ask what we owe those in crisis in our families, biological or otherwise.
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addictbrother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal.
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
With his sponsor's blessing, recovering alcoholic Sam partakes in a healing ceremony involving an ancient herbal medicine administered by a shaman over the course of three days, in a novel about coming to grips with the past.