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Just as questions of race and class could not be more timely subjects, this fantastic book lands on bookstore shelves ready to weave love, history, social commentary, and the supernatural into one of the more original YA books around. Are you a sucker for Seattle, the 1930's, jazz, and the fiendish hand of the devil in all our lives? Me too. Droll and always insightful, this is better than a live version of Charlie Daniels played on your Kindle or laying a golden fiddle at your feet.

Funny and a little heartbreaking, sexy and more than a little subversive, insightful and allusive-"not adjectives you’d necessarily think would describe a novel about 24 hours in the life of a harried stay-at-home dad. At least not based on my own occasional stay at home experience(s). But in Fathermucker, Greg Olear manages to squeeze all that and more into a single day, making even the most banal aspects of child-rearing (and, let's be honest, there's a lot of them) pretty damn entertaining. This is a book about parenting, about marriage, about gender dynamics, about pop culture-about what it means to be a good father, and a good husband. Do we need any more of these types of books? I wouldn't have thought so, but the answer appears to be an emphatic yes. The obvious antecedent is Little Children, as pointed out in the PW review, although they spell Tom Perrotta’s name wrong, "but aside from the surface element of having stay-at-home dads as central characters, the two books have little in common. Perrotta’s main concern seemed to be telling an amusing but unabashedly ready-for-Meg Ryan story, while Olear is on the whole more ambitious, his subversion not just a product of afternoon adultery, but what treads deep (and frighteningly) in the water of the parental soul. By the end of the book, there’s not much about Josh Lansky we don’t know; his flaws are readily apparent. Olear channels Joyce more than he does Perrotta, although Fathermucker is way more fun-and much shorter-than Ulysses. At least I think it is, since I gave up on Ulysses halfway through and read Beyond The Valley of the Dolls instead. At any rate, although there are elements of his debut novel, Totally Killer, that survive in this sophomore effort-the engaging first-person narrator, the rude obsession with pop culture, and the MacGuffin of a mystery-this is a different kind of work. It's a “Way We Live Now” sort of story that sharply elbows out a space in the queue to become the definitive stay-at-home dad novel.

Through this very funny and forthright look at an unusual family dynamic (actually far more usual than the family itself imagines), Blau has written a Santa Barbara morality tale. A present-day medical emergency forces three siblings to confront the ways in which their pre-seatbelt and bike helmet 70's upbringing has informed who they've become. The story, told in refreshingly clean prose (there is no overt cleverness to distract--Blau knows her story and its details are more than enough to keep our attention) is delivered from multiple perspectives. Each sibling gets their say on shared experiences, leading to a more compelling understanding of what otherwise might have been just comic set pieces. The juggled points of view are handled seamlessly, many chapters delivering the arc of a good short story. The episodic nature of the time frame also nests cleverly with a series of personal revelations, each shift revealing another portentous layer. Drinking Closer to Home is a lot of fun--too exact and specific to be entirely fiction, but too satisfying to be constrained by memoir.