Rating: 4 stars

Anna, Portia and Emery return home after their mother, Louise, has a massive heart attack. Staying at the house with their father, Buzzy, memories of the past swirl around them like the blue-grey smoke of their mother’s ever-present cigarette.

In addition to dealing with their mother’s failing health, each family member is at a pivotal point in their life.

Louise and Buzzy’s parenting skills leave much to be desired. An artist and pot-smoking-hippie-chick, Louise has produced three offspring that she neither has the time nor the interest in nurturing. Louise decides to relinquish the responsibility for the care of her home and baby son to eight-year-old Portia and 11 year old Anna. Rather than a cohesive, loving unit, the family seems more like five people who met on a train; each seeming to orbit in their own little worlds.

As if surviving the immediate family isn’t enough, the grandparents aren’t much better. At least when paternal (kosher) grandparents Bubbe and Zeyde come to visit, the house gets a good cleaning and the pot plants get hidden away. Although it’s not clear if that makes up for the Sixteen Candles-like scene when grandma Bubbe displays a pair of Portia’s underwear in the kitchen announcing to everyone, “Portia’s maturing now, God-bless. She’s in puberty!” To which grandpa Zeyde retorts, “You don’t have to look at her underwear to see that she’s in puberty. Look at her breasts!”

Though their return home as adults, to face down their childhood, as well as the current mortality and past mistakes of their parents may be difficult at times for Anna, Portia and Emery, they just might learn something new about themselves and each other that could have a positive effect on the future.

Jessica Anya Blau’s sophomore effort is a raging success. With incredible insight and endless imagination, Blau has created the ϋber-dysfunctional family who survives cringe-worthy encounters; yet manage to forge iron-clad bonds.

Blau’s genius dialogue and multi-dimensional rendering of provocative and refreshingly-original characters makes Drinking Closer To Home a must read.
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Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial; Original edition (January 18, 2011)
ISBN-13: 978-0061984020