Baby of the Family
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A wry and addictive debut about a modern-day American dynasty and its unexpected upheaval when the patriarch wills his dwindling fortune to his youngest, adopted son—setting off a chain of events that unearths secrets and tests long-held definitions of love and family.
The money is old, the problems are new.
Meet the Whitbys: an American dynasty once inundated with ungodly real estate wealth and now facing a new millennium of unfamiliar obstacles.
There was a time when the death of a Whitby would have made national news, but when the family patriarch, Roger, dies, he is alone. Word of his death travels from the long-suffering family lawyer to Roger’s clan of children (from four different marriages), and the outlook isn’t good. Roger has left everything to his twenty-one-year-old son Nick, a Whitby only in name—and Nick is nowhere to be found.
Brooke, an older daughter who is both overwhelmingly nostalgic and unexpectedly pregnant, leads the search for Nick, hoping to convince him to let her keep her Boston home. Shelley, the only child from the third marriage, hasn’t told anyone that she’s dropped out of college just months before graduation and is currently working as an amanuensis for a blind architect, with whom she crosses complicated boundaries. And when Nick, on the run from the law after a misguided act of political activism, finally appears at Shelley’s New York home, worlds collide and explode in spectacular fashion. Soon, the three siblings are faced with the question they have been running from their whole lives: What do they want their future to look like, if they can finally escape their past?
Weaving together multiple perspectives to create a portrait of the American dream gone awry, Baby of the Family is a vivid, absorbing debut about family secrets and how they define us, bind us together, and threaten to blow us apart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roosevelt's solid debut dissects a privileged family wrestling with the ghost of an imperious patriarch and dwindling fortune. Opening in 2003, the saga revolves primarily around three children of Roger Whitby Jr. Adopted son Nick inherits the patriarch's lucrative properties thanks to his manipulative mother and Whitby's fourth wife, but prefers the life of a left-wing rebel; Brooke, a daughter from Whitby's second marriage and a nurse in Boston, wrestles with her devotion to the woman she loves and the man she thinks she ought to marry and raise a child with; and free-spirited Shelley, daughter from a third marriage, moves to New York and develops a twisted relationship with a blind Egyptian architect, Kamal, after he hires her to help him write a book about urban American WASPs in the early 20th century. Nick moves in with Shelley, setting up a moment between the three siblings that'll begin to undo the havoc Roger Whitby Jr.'s will and abandonment created in his children's lives. Roger's three children are not fully formed enough outside of his shadow, and consequently the narrative feels unbalanced on a character level. Roosevelt does a good job handling the twists and turns of an unraveling dynasty, making for a diverting yet frustrating novel.