This is a long overdue review of a book that is certainly worthy of wide coverage. In this book, Joshua Braff paints a picture of a seemingly perfect Jewish family: older brother Asher, middle son Jacob, younger sister Dara, baby Gabriel, and father Abe and mother Claire.

From the publisher:

Take one adolescent boy with an overactive imagination and a flourishing libido. Add a narcissistic father who can shower is children with love one minute and verbally cut them to shreds the next. Take a mother who seems to be always “out” and three siblings at various stages of development. Hire a sexy babysitter to take care of the kids and move them all to a new house in a leafy green New Jersey town in the 1970s, and you’ve got the makings of a comic and heart-wrenching novel of suburbia.

Amazingly well written, touching, intelligent, and witty novel well worth a read.