Purchased this on the recommendation from my local bookseller “It’s only March but this may just be the best book I’ve read in 2022! A beautiful novel about coming home, confronting the past and embracing the future. This book put me in ALL MY FEELS and I haven’t been the same since.” Took me several months to start reading it, but I’m so glad I did. This is a fantastic novel. A man returns to his unnamed suburban town to help his mother care for his ailing father, which has him around during his 20th high school reunion. He decides to attend to mixed and complicated results. This story is such a beautiful in depth discussion and breakdown of American suburban life, and those who seek opportunity and escape to the Big City, and those who stay behind. Shows humanity in all kinds of different flavors and ways of being. The complicated issues of race and gender and class and sexual orientation and religion. The hope and struggle of parents, and the role of parochial schools in this system. It’s an examination on the meaning and NEED for community. On what happens when one doesn’t fit into the community around them. On the struggles to fit in, to remain true to oneself, to seek community where one can find it. Told in very funny and wryly observed present paragraphs and some powerful and illuminating flashbacks. Different narrators sharing the complicated backstories we all have. Everyone is fully fleshed out and human and nothing is easy nor perfect. But it is all devastatingly but also banal-ly real and average and immediate. The pin-point accuracy with which Varela puts the American suburb under a microscope is powerful and skewering. The character of Andres would be my contemporary, so reading about the American suburban catholic school experiences of someone in school in the 80’s and 90’s was really powerful as I felt so connected to many of these experiences, although obviously a lot of Andres’ journey was vastly different than mine. Totally deserving of all the awards. This is a gorgeous and powerful and affecting novel, that’s also funny and very easy to read and heartbreaking and touching and beautiful and is often describing such banal every day things, but with such a precise vision that so many layers and deep meanings are revealed. The lens of Andres as a Professor of Public Health adds a fascinating new view onto the different peoples of his previous community. This is a very very good book. It's taken me a month to write this review, because so much of this novel has been percolating and rolling around my brain, I wasn't yet ready to try to distill my responses into words.