The Vacationers - Emma Straub

Title: The Vacationers
Author: Emma Straub
Genre: Chick-lit
Rating: 3.5/5
# pages: 304
Date read: August, 2015

For the Posts, a two-week trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has graduated from high school. The sunlit island, its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also promise an escape from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. But all does not go according to plan: over the course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.


My expectations of this were rather low, which is probably why I ended up really enjoying it! It's pretty much your run-of-the-mill beach read, but with enough interesting characters to give it a twist... especially as I ended up changing my mind about almost all of them through the cause of the book, and found myself a lot more sympathetic to them than I had expected to in the beginning.

It's definitely not high literature in any sense of the word, but it's an entertaining read about a family you come to care for - warts and all.