“Family vacation always comes
with baggage. The Wright family is in ruins. Sue Ellen Wright has what she
thinks is a close-to-perfect life. A terrific career as a Classics professor, a
loving husband, and a son who is just about to safely leave the nest. But then
disaster strikes. She learns that her husband is cheating, and that her son has
made a complete mess of his life. So, when the opportunity to take her family
to a Greek island for a month presents itself, she jumps at the chance. This sunlit
Aegean paradise, with its mountains and beaches is, after all, where she first
fell in love with both a man and with an ancient culture. Perhaps Sue Ellen’s
past will provide the key to her and her family’s salvation.”
More darkly humorous than
laugh out loud funny, Honestly, We Meant Well takes a very liberal Berkeley
based intellectual family whose lives are slowly unraveling. Wife Sue Ellen has
been teaching for three decades and is “worried that
undergraduate laziness was becoming more the norm than an anomaly.” Her husband
Dean is celebrated author with fans who sort of stalk him and even sleep with
him. And their son Will, on the cusp of graduating college and still unsure
what he should do with his life –which includes being the son of a celebrated
professor of classical studies and bestselling author.
There is
a fine line with these characters –they are morbidly trashy in some respect and
dumb in others. And Dean plays too much the victim card here, having various affairs
with much younger women and who fails to understand his own son’s issues,
including the fact he plagiarizes his college thesis. And though Sue Ellen is
not that horrible, she is another in a long line of women who for reasons never
fully explain, stays with a cheating husband.
The Greek descriptions are great –makes you want to go there; a nice bit of travelogue and history to counterpoint some lesser interesting things that happen in the book. I think it could’ve been a bit more humorous and less turgid (it took me longer than it should to get through it), but I liked it enough to get Grant Ginder’s other book, People We Hate at the Wedding.
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