The Accidental Favorite
A Novel
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Amazing Grace Adams comes a wryly resonant and deeply moving family dramedy investigating the question so many of us have asked ourselves: do my parents have a favorite?
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. But when Patrick’s reaction to a freak accident on the first day of the trip inadvertently reveals that he has a favorite daughter, no one is prepared for the shockwaves it sends through the family.
Decades-old unresolved sibling rivalries are suddenly unmasked. And be it newly uncovered smoking habits, ancient crushes, or private doubts about life decisions both big and small, no one’s secrets are safe. Still-tender wounds are reopened amid an audience of friends, husbands, grandchildren, and even coworkers, and as the family's past is re-written, they find themselves suddenly unmoored.
In a lively, poignant examination of memory, sisterhood, and family ties, Fran Littlewood reminds us just why it is that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tensions flare during an English family's vacation in the country in Littlewood's emotive sophomore outing (after Amazing Grace Adams). The action begins with a falling tree, when Patrick Fisher rushes past his two older grown daughters, Alex and Nancy, to save their younger sister, Eva—who is least in danger. Alex, the eldest at 45, resents her husband, Luc, who doesn't pitch in enough with their three children. She obsessively lurks on social media for updates on her first boyfriend, Matt, whom she hasn't seen in decades, and struggles with not having lived up to her potential after being deemed the smart one by her parents. Nancy, 44, worries that her childhood reputation as the family screwup will reemerge if she tells them she's been suspended from her doctor job following a clash with a patient. Eva, a child model turned savvy businesswoman at 40, is anxious about the family discovering her recent secret marriage to Scott, whom her parents and siblings think is a gold digger. Some of the action is a bit stagey, but the sisters' bitterness, judgments, and rivalries feel all too genuine, and the story shifts effortlessly between the present and the sisters' childhoods, culminating in the revelation of a secret that explains Patrick's behavior. The author's fans will find much to love.
