Michelle Huneven's sixth novel, Bug Hollow, is a glistening portrait of one California family from the mid-1970s onward: beset by losses but expanded through serendipity and friendship.
Readers are introduced to the Samuelson family--dad Phil, an architect; mom Sibyl, a fourth-grade teacher; and three kids--through the eyes of eight-year-old Sally. Sally's older brother, Ellis, moved to Bug Hollow, a hunting lodge-turned-student rental (make that hippie commune) in the Santa Cruz Mountains, to work in an ice cream shop the summer after high school. When the Samuelsons drive to collect him so he can take up his baseball scholarship at Ole Miss, they find him deeply enmeshed with 20-year-old Julia. The aftermath of this, plus another short-lived romance, alters the course of the family's future forever.
A rotating close third-person perspective spotlights each family member, widening the view to include those who join via marriage and unexpected pregnancies. Through discrete chapters that function almost like linked short stories, Huneven (Blame; Search) builds an affectionate record of several generations. She invites equal compassion for all of them, even when they make bad decisions--such as when Sibyl avoids her grief by drinking spiked Hawaiian punch from a plastic tumbler all day long. Minor characters, including Sibyl's math wiz student and formidable principal, are just as charmingly quirky.
The Samuelsons and their hangers-on form a dysfunctional family that's easy to love, despite each character's flaws. Fans of Jami Attenberg, Ann Patchett, and Anne Tyler need to try Huneven's work pronto. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck