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THE KIDS ARE GONNA ASK
By Gretchen Anthony

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

Chef Bart served a buffet of appetizers and created a new cocktail called the “Truth Hurts”—one-part whiskey, three parts Fireball, and served in a glass rimmed with habanero pepper oil… He handed Maggie the inaugural glass. “You’re either swallowing fire or breathing it.”

 

George used to accuse her of being part earthworm— always making her way into the sun but forgetting how easily she wilted. “What am I going to do the day I come home to find you all shriveled up on the sidewalk?” he’d say.

 

For example, she found a white paper online about a woman named Sarah Adelbaum in Poplar Springs, Idaho, who had EKGs documenting her ability to match her heartbeat almost identically to Battle Hymn of the Republic and Yankee Doodle. Ms. Adelbaum’s quality of life was virtually unaffected and, even more, the only complaint she listed was that her heart didn’t have a wider catalog of music.

 

One woman, Alexis DuVrey posted a bedtime blessing for Thomas and Savannah every night at the same time. He only knew this, of course, because Sam Tamblin thought it was hysterical. “May the energy of the universe overwhelm those spirts that would do you hard,” she wrote one night. It was obviously an innocent and unfortunate series of typos, but ever since, Sam couldn’t resist calling on the “the spirts” to do him “hard.”

 

I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid.

 

My Review:

 

I am decidedly enamored with this author; I enjoyed her bitingly clever Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners and hoped I was in for a similar treat in picking her second offering. Ms. Anthony excels at unique and oddly enticing characters who are more than a tad off-center. And while the peculiar characters in this tale were not always admirable or likable, they were achingly realistic and gaining hard-won insights while learning painful life lessons in an extremely public manner. My favorite characters of The Kids Are Gonna Ask were the grandmother/guardian Maggie and the secondary cast members of Nadine and Chef Bart. Chef Bart, and in particular Nadine – while only a teen, were the type of human beings we all wished we were and or were even capable of being.

The writing was humorously and keenly perceptive, unfailingly engaging, and laced with cunning and witty scenarios and amusing brain-tickling twists such as the simple weekly Podcast that thrusts the teenage twins from obscurity into instant fame after their small independent production went viral when featuring an unusually odd dinner guest of their grandmother who imparted a rather bizarre in-utero twin-eating anecdote which was soon dubbed as “Zombie Baby.” The twins decided to parlay their sudden success into delving into their origin story to track down their biological father, who was completely unknown to them and had rarely been discussed by their deceased mother. Tested loyalties, anxieties, betrayals, revelations, humiliations, tears, devastations, and epiphanies occurred along their journey and the superbly evocative and emotive writing kept me right there with them every step of the way.

I am more than eager to see who and what the profoundly perceptive Ms. Anthony hones in on next.

GRETCHEN ANTHONY is the author of Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners, which was a Midwestern Connections Pick and a best books pick by Amazon, BookBub, PopSugar, and the New York Post. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Medium, and The Write Life, among others. She lives in Minneapolis with her family.