Happy Families Are All Alike: Readings from Three Novels

In Sharon Guskin’s The Forgetting Time: A Novel, the four-year old son of a single mother is plagued by memories of a past life he wishes to return to. A brilliantly funny novel about ambition and marriage, Jennifer Close‘s The Hopefuls tells the story of a young wife who follows her husband and his political dreams to Washington, D.C., a city of idealism, gossip, and complicated friendships among the young aspiring elite. The Wangs vs. the World is Jade Chang‘s hilarious debut novel about a wealthy but fractured Chinese immigrant family that had it all, only to lose every last cent—and about the road trip they take across America that binds them back together.