Grown Ups by Marie Aubert | Blog Tour Book Review

[AD/Gifted - I received a ebook copy of this book for the purpose of this review. All thoughts and opinions are my own. This post contains affiliate links.]

Grown Ups by Marie Aubert - 3/5

Blurb:

Ida is a forty-year-old architect, single and starting to panic. She's navigating Tinder and contemplating freezing her eggs, but forces these worries to the back of her mind as she sets off to the family cabin for her mother's sixty-fifth birthday.

But family ties old and new begin to wear thin, out in the idyllic Norwegian countryside. Ida is fighting with her sister Marthe, flirting with Marhte's husband and winning the favour of Marthe's stepdaughter. Some supposedly wonderful news from her sister sets tensions simmering even further, building to an almighty clash between Ida and her sister, her mother, her whole family.

Exhilarating, funny and unexpectedly devastating, Grown Ups asks what kind of adult you are without a family of your own.

Review:

40 year old Ida, younger sister Marthe, Marthe's husband Kristoffer and Kristoffer's six-year-old daughter from a previous marriage are at the family's old childhood holiday cabin celebrating Ida and Marthe's mother's 65th birthday.

For a short story, just over 100 pages, there is a lot to unpack. Both women have struggled with fertility. Marthe has now fallen pregnant and Ida realises that she may have left having a family too late and looks into freezing her eggs. She was the type to just meet men through Tinder, not even caring if they were married, and never settling down. It is now that she sees children everywhere, that she panics that she will never be a mother. 

It is a very character driven novel but I will be honest and say that I didn't love any of the characters, I think they all had their downsides. 

Ida seems to have put her career before anything else, aiming to be the poster child. There is a lot of sibling rivalry between her and Marthe, even now in their 30s/early 40s.

Grown Ups is an interesting look at family dynamics, fertility and what it is like to be a grown up without children of your own.

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A massive thank you to Pushkin Press for having me on the blog tour. You can find the Twitter handles of all the other bloggers who are taking part in the graphic below.