Ida is a forty-year-old architect, single and starting to panic. She’s navigating Tinder and contemplating freezing her eggs, but forces these worries to the back of her mind as she sets off to the family cabin for her mother’s sixty-fifth birthday.

But family ties old and new begin to wear thin, out in the idyllic Norwegian countryside. Ida is fighting with her sister Marthe, flirting with Marthe’s husband and winning the favour of Marthe’s stepdaughter. Some supposedly wonderful news from her sister sets tensions simmering even further, building to an almighty clash between Ida and her sister, her mother, her whole family.

Exhilarating, funny and unexpectedly devastating, Grown Ups asks what kind of adult you are without a family of your own.

About the author

Marie Aubert made her debut in 2016 with the short story collection Can I Come Home With You, which sold more than 10,000 copies in Norway. Grown Ups is her first novel, and won the Young People’s Critics’ Prize (Norway’s equivalent to the Goncourt des lyceens) and was nominated for the Booksellers’ Prize. Rights have already been sold in ten other countries.

My review

Grown Ups is told from the point of view of architect Ida who is 40 years old. We are introduced to her just as she is off to the lakeside family cabin in Norway to celebrate her mother’s 65th birthday.

This book was relatively short and covered some important issues within those pages. Unfortunately the main character I did not connect with her at all. I would have liked to have read more and seen where the story would develop further. Was a good read but the characters were quite a toxic family and reading about them and what they said and did to one another didn’t make me really like any of them! Although saying that it did make me read on and I did wonder what happened next in each of their lives.

Disclaimer – Thank you to the publisher for my gifted copy of the book for my honest review