Staff Picks: More Quirky Fiction: Dysfunctional Family Edition
by emjane
As I’ve said before, Quirky Fiction is my favorite genre, and my favorite sub-variant are books featuring dysfunctional families. There’s a fine line with dysfunction in quirky fiction – for my taste it generally needs to tread heavier on the “makes me laugh” rather than the “makes me want to cry” side of the line. But there’s something about the parent-child and sibling-to-sibling dynamics that keep me reading more.
The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson | Request Now
As children, Annie and Buster Fang were forced to participate in their parents’ public performance art. They escaped that world after becoming adults, but when life circumstances bring them both back to the family home, their folks attempt to pull them into their last big performance piece.
Kevin Wilson is the king of quirky fiction (at least in my domain), and The Family Fang is an ideal introduction to the strange version of the world he creates. Though the absurdity of the circumstances of the book often make you laugh, there’s a lot of heart and depth of characters as well.
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett | Request Now
Taxidermist Jessa’s world starts to fall apart when she goes into work one morning and finds her father has committed suicide in the family shop. The grief surrounding this impacts her family in different ways: while Jessa works to keep the family’s taxidermy business running, her brother disengages and her mother begins creating rather obscene art with items from the shop. Mostly Dead Things obviously trends closer to the sad than the funny, but the dark humor of the ways the family copes and the resiliency of Jessa made the experience of reading this book more intriguing than depressing.
Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners by Gretchen Anthony| Request Now
Violet Baumgartner’s family is perfect – particularly the way she portrays them in her annual Christmas letter. But when her husband Richards’s retirement party is ruined by some unwelcome news from her daughter Cerise, Violet’s perfect life takes a very public turn for the worse. Told from multiple perspectives and sprinkled with ephemera like Christmas letters past, invitations, and church bulletins, Evergreen Tidings is a propulsive read with just enough heft to keep it from feeling entirely candy (not that there’s anything wrong with purely fluff reads!)
The Wangs vs. The World by Jade Chang | Request Now
Chinese immigrant Charles Wang made a fortune for himself after moving to America. But after living large, Charles lost everything. Everything, that is, except some land that was rightfully his in China. So, naturally, Charles gathers his wife and three children (whose lives have also been upended by this loss of income) and makes plans to start his new life. The “rich people suddenly have to survive on less” trope is nearly always entertaining, and Chang does excellent work with the premise.
It’s been seven years since this was published and I keep waiting for Chang to write another novel (though she has a few short Amazon-exclusives, I want more!). Here’s hoping it’s in the pipeline.
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