High-end interior designer Alice Sullivan has a picture-perfect life, with a gorgeous house, two well-behaved children, a successful lawyer husband, and a cute dog. But while at a parent-teacher conference for her second-grader (who, it turns out, isn't doing so well in reading), Alice receives an emergency call to the junior high, where her son has been involved in a very public bullying incident — as the bully. Suddenly, the perfect world she's created begins crumbling, and Alice understandably is struggling to hold it together, a process made all the more difficult by her husband's absence (business trip) and some big news her child-psychologist mother is planning on divulging (completely oblivious to how this will affect Alice, of course).
Sometimes dysfunctional family stories can end up over-the-top crazy, with unrealistic problems, wacky solutions, and outsized personalities. Thankfully (and, as a parent of similar-aged kids to Alice's, a bit unsettlingly), West manages realistic people and situations marvelously, with plenty of heart, humor, and life-like parenting frustrations. I absolutely loved this book.
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