In The Kids Are Gonna Ask, the funny, fast-paced, multi-format second novel from Gretchen Anthony (Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners), a well-intentioned quest to uncover a family secret upends the lives of two Midwestern teens and their grandmother when their story goes viral.
When Bess McClair came home pregnant after a ski trip her senior year of college and decided to become a single mother, her mother, Maggie, welcomed the distraction from her grief over the recent death of her husband. She didn't pressure Bess to identify the father of the babies, fraternal twins Savannah and Thomas. Thirteen years later, Bess died in a freak accident, leaving Maggie and the kids no way to find the "biodad."
Now 17, the McClair twins run an amateur podcast notable for spawning the Internet phenomenon Zombie Baby. Studio owner Sam Tamblin listens to the breakout episode, in which Thomas mentions wishing he could meet his father, and offers to produce a podcast about the twins' search for him. When paternity privacy activists get wind of the fledgling show, the twins become the center of a media circus railing against them as dupes of an "angry feminist" agenda and questioning their right to conduct a public search.
Using third-person narrative, podcast and voicemail transcripts, e-mails, text message conversations and more, Anthony constructs a portrait of the difficult and delicate process of adolescence, when the search for one's identity becomes entangled with peer relationships and ambitions for the future. Smart yet surprisingly sweet, this meditation on family and media is as captivating as a favorite podcast. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads