The Vacationers Rant Review
The Vacationers by Emma Straub
2014
Fiction
This is Full Spoilers because I hope no one will subject themselves to this book after reading my review.
The Vacationers follows the Post family vacation in Spain as truths are revealed and characters interact.
As you may have been able to tell by my summary of the novel, I felt very little connection to the book. There was nothing in the characters, plot, or writing that made me care about what happened in this book. The Vacationers is marketed as a beach novel, with raving critic reviews on the cover and inside pages. I honestly don’t know how anyone read this book and wrote so positively about it. I did everything right to try and enjoy this book, reading it on the beach and when I was in the mood for a light rom-com. It did not give me the dramatic plot, interesting characters, or any of the humor I had been promised.
One of the things I hated about this book was the third person narration. It gave the point of view of seven characters, doing none of them justice. Everyone pretty much sounded the same. I would have loved to have known more about each of the characters. There was potential for them to be interesting, but the large cast was too much
Since I am assuming you have now decided you are not going to read this novel, here is the rundown of each of the characters. This is all you need to know about the plot. It’s each of these characters and their baggage interacting in the most boring way possible.
Frannie: 55, mother to Syliva and Jim’s wife. She is a food critic who travels around the world. Straub makes sure to tell us multiple times throughout the novel how she has let herself go. She also takes back her cheating husband who tells us from his point of view how much he dislikes his wife.
Jim: 60, cheated on Frannie with a 23 year old at his magazine company. He was subsequently fired because the 23 year old’s father was on the board. Jim is now retired and bored, but he does not regret what he did because his wife let herself go and is overweight…
Sylvia: 18, her entire plot centers on a boy *sigh.* I wouldn’t have hated it if it didn’t feel so clichéd and if Sylvia actually sounded like an 18 year old. Author included paragraphs about how Sylvia isn’t like other girls because she doesn’t wear makeup, she doesn’t care about clothes, she reads books etc. Even worse, the author, through third person, talks about how pretty she would be if she reinvented herself. It’s implied that Sylvia will follow in her mother’s footsteps.
Bobby: 28, Frannie’s and Jim’s oldest child. He was a realtor in Miami, but business was bad, so he became a personal trainer at a gym for some reason that’s not super clear. 150k in debt because he bought into a protein powder MLM scheme. He’s an extremely unlikable character who seems to have zero motive for his badness. Cheats on his girlfriend Carmen literally all the time.
Carmen: 40, Bobby’s girlfriend. She’s been a personal trainer for years and loves it. I really liked her and wish she’d been developed more. She actually leaves Bobby in the end. The entire Post family hates her because she’s older and has muscles and knows what she wants to do in life…
Charlie: a painter, 60, Frannie’s best friend and Lawrence’s husband. Jim hates him for being too close to Frannie. Not quite sure why he came along on the Post family vacation. His relationship with Lawrence is not explored as much as it could have been, making him the token gay best friend.
Lawrence: Charlie’s husband, much younger than him, desperately wants to have a child. The couple succeeds in adopting a child at the end. They were probably the only two people I was rooting for.
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