The Vacationers by Emma Straub

For the Posts, a two-week trip to the island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: it's Franny and Jim's thirty-fifth anniversary, and their daughter has graduated from high school. The sunlit island also promises an escape from the tensions simmering at home. But all does not go according to plan: secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.

From Amazon:

From the beginning, no one is particularly thrilled about this sojourn. Initially booked as a 35th wedding anniversary present, the Post marriage is now in flux. 60 year old Jim has recently been forced to resign as the editor of a New York Magazine for his dalliance with a 23 year old intern. His wife Fanny is a writer "going around the world and writing about what she ate" is deciding what her next course of action might be. Sylvia, their 18 year old daughter, is ready to begin Brown University in the fall and wants to lose her virginity. She is disheartened to see the fighting among her parents and has recently gone through her own angst due to her girl /boyfriend's duplicitous actions. 28 year old Bobby is a realtor and lives in Florida. He is a casualty of the real-estate bubble. He has been living with his girlfriend Carmen, who is 10 years older, for seven years without making a commitment. Carmen is an instructor at the Total Body Power and feels like an outsider, everything she does in order to please her boyfriend's family "never seemed to be right". Charles is Fanny's best friend and he and husband Lawrence have been trying to adopt a baby to complete their family.

We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

I enjoyed this book very much, but it did feel a bit too long.  The writing was very good and the characters carefully drawn and developed, but in my opinion, the story could have been told in fewer pages.  Here is a review from Publisher's Weekly:

In his powerful and significant debut novel, Thomas masterfully evokes one woman's life in the context of a brilliantly observed Irish working-class milieu. Eileen Tumulty was born in the early '40s, the only child and dutiful caretaker of alcoholic parents. As a young woman, she hopes to leave her family's dingy apartment in Woodside, Queens, and move up the social ladder. Eileen falls in love with and marries Ed Leary, a quiet neuroscientist whom she sees as the means to an upper-middle-class future. But Ed is dedicated to pure scientific research, and he turns down lucrative job offers from pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions. The couple's apartment in Jackson Heights is a step up from Eileen's parents' apartment, but she wants a home in tony Westchester County. Later, Eileen pursues an arduous career as a nursing administrator to secure a future for their son, Connell. But once she gets her gracious but dilapidated fixer-upper in Bronxville, in southern Westchester, Ed is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and the family slowly endures "the encroaching of a fathomless darkness." Thomas works on a large canvas to create a memorable depiction of Eileen's vibrant spirit, the intimacy of her love for Ed, and the desperate stoicism she exhibits as reality narrows her dreams. Her life, observed over a span of six decades, comes close to a definitive portrait of American social dynamics in the 20th century. Thomas's emotional truthfulness combines with the novel's texture and scope to create an unforgettable narrative.

I didn't really love Eileen, but I guess I was  not supposed to....that was one issue I had with the book. I wanted to feel her pain a little more deeply, but her character flaws prevented that. Still, it was a really interesting view of what a family would go through when encountering Early Alzheimer's disease. Scary!

We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

This is the story of an American family....an ordinary family in every way but one...but I won't say how the family is different and be a spoiler. (Although I knew when I started the book.)

Here is a quote from the author of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini:

"I thought this was a gripping, big-hearted book . . . through the tender voice of her protagonist, Fowler has a lot to say about family, memory, language, science, and indeed the question of what constitutes a human being."

The Cooke family: Mom and Dad, brother Lowell  and sisters Fern and the narrator, Rosemary form this family that is broken up and separated when Rosemary is just five years old.  Her journey is told in this gripping story...a book I could not put down. It's full of truths about humans, our connections to animals, about humanity in general.

Read it. You will fall in love with Fern and even Lowell, once you understand where his anger is coming from.

Landline by Rainbow Rowell

At the start, I like this book, but after reading half of it, I was sick of it. The characters did not engage me particularly. And I was troubled that her conflict between family and career ended up taking a back seat.  (Maybe that was the idea?)

I will say that I liked the general theme - marriage as a difficult institution.  The relationship between Georgie McCool (yes, that name pissed me off from the beginning, but look at the author's name!) and Neal is challenging but no probably no more challenging than the "typical" marriage.  Life has ups and downs and living with another human being is not always easy.  There was no abuse, or infidelity

Rowell uses a very clever device - the landline - in a sci fi kind of way when she "talks" to her husband and children in Omaha during the Christmas vacation. She has stayed behind while he takes their two girls to Omaha to visit his mother for Christmas.  Georgie stays behind to write scripts for the TV show that she and her partner, Seth, have just had accepted by a big TV producer, This is their BIG BREAK finally, and she can't risk taking off for Omaha when their deadline looms near.

Seth and Georgie are like brother and sister. They have been writing partners for years and know each other better than anyone else. In some ways, she's closer to Seth than to Neal. But Neal is not jealous; maybe that bothers her!

In any event, she tries over and over to talk to Neal in Omaha and eventually reaches him on the landline in her childhood room, but the Neal she is talking to is the one she was dating about 20 years ago. This is an interesting technique the author uses to fill us in on their relationship history, courtship and engagement, and also offers insight into how and why Georgie fell in love with Neal and her inner conflict over the issues in their lives.

Anyway, in the end, it was not one of my favorites, but it was a fast and easy read.

The Financial Lives of Poets by Jess Walter

Loved Beautiful Ruins  so picked this up and was not disappointed. It's a very different book from Beautiful Ruins. Much funnier and sarcastic and cynical.

This novel tells a story of a small town financial journalist who has quit his job and is on the verge of bankruptcy. His marriage is failing (he suspects his wife is fooling around with an old flame) and he is logging into her social media accounts to spy on her.  He had this idea to develop a website, poetfolio.com, that combines free verse with financial journalism. The book starts off with some free verse and every chapter begins that way. Some entire chapters are in free verse. A very interesting concept.
Walter is a very talented and funny author. I found myself marveling at his imagery, metaphors and clever writing. 
The story started to wear on me, however, and I did figure out how it would end.
But I will continue to explore Walters' books. He is a real talent.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

What a captivating story! I loved this book. It takes place in Alaska in 1920. Jack and Mabel, a childless couple from Pennsylvania have decided to homestead in a  brutal place: Alaska. They are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

From Westchester Library System:

To the women in the hair-braiding salon, Ifemelu seems to have everything a Nigerian immigrant in America could desire, but the culture shock, hardships, and racism she's endured have left her feeling like she has cement in her soul. Smart, irreverent, and outspoken, she reluctantly left Nigeria on a college scholarship. Her aunty Uju, the pampered mistress of a general in Lagos, is now struggling on her own in the U.S., trying to secure her medical license. Ifemelu's discouraging job search brings on desperation and depression until a babysitting gig leads to a cashmere-and-champagne romance with a wealthy white man. Astonished at the labyrinthine racial strictures she's confronted with, Ifemelu, defining herself as a Non-American Black, launches an audacious, provocative, and instantly popular blog in which she explores what she calls Racial Disorder Syndrome. Meanwhile, her abandoned true love, Obinze, is suffering his own cold miseries as an unwanted African in London. Americanah is a courageous, world-class novel about independence, integrity, community, and love and what it takes to become a full human being