Four Terrible Parents by Calla Henkel
Two chaotic couples move back to their hometown and attempt to raise a family in this witty and incisive exploration of modern relationships
Raul and Valentine are breaking up the band. Raul’s fiancé Banner is ending his high-flying career. Val’s off-and-on partner Linh is grappling with gender. Really, it’s the perfect time to move back to Val and Banner’s rural South Carolina hometown and fix up the possibly haunted hotel Val has suddenly inherited – close to some of their own imperfect families, as far as possible from others. And of course, it’s also the perfect time to start a family.
Henkel’s perspective-switching narrative immediately drops another intense development into the mix; at first, like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the initial mystery is how things arrive at a devastating crime, and the second mystery is how the crisis resolves. Four Terrible Parents relishes each switch in character point of view, smartly building reader knowledge alongside the changing understandings of each partner/parent. A few reveals feel obvious, but the ride is so thrilling and the characters so lovable (messiness, imperfections, bad choices, and all) that the pages can’t turn fast enough. The sense of place is sketched rather than richly illustrated, but the narrative smartly avoids evoking tropes of the easily stereotyped repressed, redneck US Bible Belt or permissive Berlin arts scenes.
Four Terrible Parents accepts the horrible things that shape human lives but never gives them undue power. Ultimately, the friends we can (or, as Val believes, cannot) choose are all that matter.
