Ron Mohring's Reviews > Family Meal

I couldn't put this novel down. (I had to put it down--I had to work, to drive, to sit with my mother, to cook for my husband--but all I thought about was getting back to this book.) The writing is lean and fast; the characters and their stories build piece by piece and I can't not care about them, though it's as if the novel doesn't *need* me to care. And it's set in Houston, and I remember Houston and how I wandered the city and made terrible decisions in the aftermath of losing my first husband (the first time I returned to our favorite Mexican restaurant in Montrose, haunting our haunts, and the server asked *Where is your friend?* and I said, in Spanish, He died on me, and drank too much and drove home and cried in the dark on the garden bench) (the sex with utter strangers)--but even here, even in Cam's self-debasement, which I feel viscerally, his chosen family allows him to simply *be* without judgment but not without showing they care--how to explain how this just gutted me? Sometimes we don't know what we need. Sometimes we abandon our friends. Sometimes we lose a great love. Sometimes we are lucky to find love again.