The struggle for belonging and self-acceptance drives this Midwestern family’s mini-dramas in the 2010s. The humorously upbeat narrative alternates between the third-person perspectives of three generations of Jewish women: Mona Grossman, her teenage daughter Grace, and Mona’s grandmother, Esther “Bubby” Rosenfeld. Mona, a full-time homemaker, struggles to reconnect with Grace, and to save her marriage with Rich. Her 20th high school reunion forces her to take a good hard look at herself, and to reassess her priorities and her goals. Meanwhile, high school freshman Grace resents both her controlling mother and her school’s popular cliques. She breaks free of her mother’s hold on her, and she overcomes her social anxiety by joining the band Green Light as a guitarist. After Mona, Grace, and Rich persuade Esther to move to an assisted living facility called Enliven, Esther befriends its other residents. While Esther’s judgment is not consistently reliable, she’s ultimately portrayed as a wise old woman who manages to reconnect Mona and Grace, encouraging them to accept their own selves and each other. While Grace rapidly morphs from an awkward and inhibited teenager into a confident and empowered guitarist, Mona gradually spirals downward into anxiety and stagnation. She was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school, but Mona can no longer keep it all together, as signified by the accidental spillage of the contents of her purse at the reunion. By contrast, Esther quickly accepts her relocation to Enliven. She experiences neither Grace’s growing pains nor Mona’s ambivalence about high school glory days. Yet, as the title of Act II states, Esther continues to learn that “Things Aren’t Always What They Seem.” Although the alternation between the Mona, Grace, and Esther chapters produces a rapid page-turner, these different narrative strands keep the novel from feeling focused. The novel could also benefit from greater variation in the different characters’ sections, which read too similarly despite their generational differences.