Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists: Dysfunctional Families

Born to survivalists in Idaho, she stockpiled food and slept with her "head-for-the-hills" bag. In the summer, she stewed herbs for her mother and salvaged her father's junkyard in the winter.The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. As a way out, Tara began to educate herself, learning enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University.
(Description from catalog)

For readers of Educated and The Glass Castle, a harrowing, redemptive and profoundly inspiring memoir of childhood trauma and its long reach into adulthood. (Description from catalog.)

The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities. (Description from catalog)

In the gripping true crime story, three courageous and strong sisters band together to escape their sadistic mother’s unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture and psychic terrors, which resulted in multiple murders. (Description from NoveList.)

A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy. (Description from catalog)

The author recounts his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn as the child of Irish immigrants who decide to return to worse poverty in Ireland when his infant sister dies. (Description from NoveList)

It's been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father's most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.
(Description from catalog)

From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling novel of family, following a troubled mother and her two daughters over forty years and through a swiftly changing American landscape as they seek lives they can fully claim as their own.
(Description from catalog)

Slasher meets satire, in this darkly comic novel set in Nigeria about a woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends.
(Description from catalog)

In 1983, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse for wear, and the family begins the hard work of trying to move on with their lives and resume their prized places in the saga of the American dream, coming to understand that though their money may have been what put them in danger, it is also what guaranteed them their safety in the end.
(Description from catalog)

One night, Louisa and her father walk on the beach. He carries a flashlight but cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found washed up, barely alive, and her father is gone. She is ten years old. Susan Choi's Flashlight explores the shockwaves of this catastrophe through shifting perspectives.
(Description from NoveList)

A joyfully unhinged story of money, marriage, sex, and revenge unspools when a billionaire crashes his hot-air balloon into the middle of a post-pandemic first date.
(Description from NoveList)

Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family.
(Description from NoveList)

When Kyle McCray learns his father has suffered a debilitating stroke, he returns to his hometown of Potsdam, New York, expecting a cold reception. Two and a half years ago, he left abruptly, abandoning those who depended on him, including his wife Casey, a beloved teacher. Kyle plans to help his dad recuperate and leave again, especially since Casey wants him gone. As he spends time at home, Kyle realizes the impact of his departure.
(Description from NoveList)

Vivienne and Patrick Fisher have done an excellent job raising their three daughters, Alex, Nancy, and Eva. They’re well-adjusted women with impressive careers, caring partners, exciting hobbies, and sweet children. So it’s with great anticipation that three generations of Fishers gather at a beautiful glass house in the English countryside for a weeklong celebration of Vivienne’s seventieth birthday.
(Description from NoveList)

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under--but rather than face the music, he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home. Where did it all go wrong?
(Description from catalog)

When her notorious, hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled and agoraphobic mother goes missing, teenage Bee begins a trip that takes her to the ends of the earth to find her. (Description from NoveList)

A warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives. (Description from catalog)

As Gail navigates the chaos of her daughter Debbie's wedding preparations--including a job loss, exclusion from family events, and the unexpected arrival of her ex-husband Max--she faces a crisis that threatens the wedding and forces both parents to confront unresolved issues from their past.
(Description from NoveList)

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep.
(Description from NoveList)

Once upon a time, the Peacock sisters were little girls who combed each other's tangled hair. But decades of secrets have led them to separate lives--and to telling lies, to themselves and to one another. Sylvie is getting married. Again. A librarian and widow who soothes her grief by escaping into books, Sylvie has caught the attention of an unlikely match: Simon Rampling, a mysterious, wealthy man from Northern England. Sylvie allows herself to imagine a life beside him--one filled with the written word, kindness, and companionship. She's ready to love again...or is she?
(Description from catalog)

Sisters Cassie and Zoe were born just a year apart but could not have been more different. Zoe yearned for fame while Cassie was a musical prodigy who never felt at home in her own skin and preferred the safety of the shadows. In the early 2000s, destiny intervened, catapulting the sisters into the spotlight as the pop sensation the Griffin Sisters. But after a year, the band abruptly broke up.
(Description from NoveList)

An unusual memoir done in the form of a graphic novel by a cult favorite comic artist offers a darkly funny family portrait that details her relationship with her father, a historic preservation expert dedicated to restoring the family's Victorian home, funeral home director, high-school English teacher, and closeted homosexual. (Description from NoveList.)

"A young couple is stuck in traffic, reading a book aloud to each other to pass the time. The relationship is already strained, but between the encroaching road rage, and a novel that hits way too close to home, tensions are running especially high by the time they arrive back at their apartment. When one of them leaves to get takeout and a movie, each of the young lovers is individually forced to confront loss, grief, fear, and insecurities in unexpected and shocking ways. Crane's formal use of the comics medium -- threading several timelines and the interior and exterior lives of its protagonists together to create an increasing, almost Hitchcockian sense of dread and paranoia -- is masterful. But as the title hints, there are dualities at its core that make it one of the most exciting works of graphic literary fiction in recent memory, a brilliant adult drama that showcases a deep empathy and compassion for its characters as well as a visually arresting showcase of Crane's considerable talents. Keeping Two is ostensibly a story about loss, but by the end, it just might also be about finding something along the way -- something that had seemed irredeemable up to that point. In that way, it's also a deeply romantic book."--provided by publisher.

"Set in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Tokyo, Murasaki Yamada's Talk to My Back (1981-84) explores the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams through a woman's relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence, and with her husband, who works late and sees his wife as little more than a domestic servant."--Amazon.