Drinking Closer to Home: a Book Review

The blizzard this week gave me an unexpected gift. It slowed life down. Way down. For two days we were free of afterschool activities and school pick up and drop offs. We ate when we wanted to eat. We played board games. And we spent many delicious slow hours reading under blankets on the couch in the snow muted daylight. Ironically, amidst all of this quiet domesticity, I was reading about a very unorthodox family, the characters at the heart of Drinking Closer to Home by Jessica Anya Blau.

The Novel in a Snapshot
Anna, Portia and Emery fly home to California when their mother Louise has a massive heart attack. While they sit with her and their father at the hospital, wondering whether she will live or die, each sibling has vivid flashbacks to their traumatic childhoods, including when Louise announced to 10-year old Anna and 8-year old Portia that she is quitting being a housewife and leaving them in charge of cooking, cleaning, and caring for their baby brother. The family continued living together in relative harmony but in a growing state of filth.

It would have been easy for the novel to turn hard and bitter, but Blau manages to weave in a great deal of love in this highly disfunctional family where no one has qualms about pointing out the others' faults, but still loves them for who they are.

Bottom Line:
I expected to be depressed by this novel, but experienced a polar opposite reaction. I loved Blau's brutally honest prose and her dry sense of humor. I also loved the characters she created, and got more attached with every page with this wacky family. Drinking Closer to Home really celebrated the concept of family, a place where people catalog every mistake you've ever made, where people know exactly who you are, and love you in spite of it all.

I can't recommend Drinking Closer to Home enough. As you get to know Portia, Anna, Emery, Buzzy and Louise, you'll go through a full range of emotions. You'll laugh. You'll be shocked. You may even cry. And somehow this crazy family will make you more tolerant of your own family dynamics. Drinking Closer to Home is a thoroughly entertaining read, but it's also a little bit like therapy.

I read Drinking Closer to Home as part of a TLC Book Tour. See what other reviewers like Write Meg and Sara's Organized Chaos had to say about the novel.