You Only Call When You’re in Trouble

In McCauley’s entertaining if overlong family saga (after My Ex-Life), a 30-something Chicago professor reckons with personal drama amid a professional crisis. Cecily, the subject of a Title IX case involving a student named Lee, receives an invitation from her mother Dorothy to visit her in Woodstock, N.Y. (Dorothy has attempted to lure Cecily by saying she’s finally ready to share the truth about Cecily’s paternity.) On the way, Cecily sees her uncle Tom, Dorothy’s brother, an architect and a surrogate father figure who looked out for Cecily when she was growing up with a single mother. Although Tom is struggling from a recent breakup and being forced to compromise on his newest architectural design, he welcomes her in Boston. Cecily happens to run into Lee at the airport, and Lee, who’s fixated on Cecily, claims that she wasn’t the one who lodged the complaint. Eventually, the story winds its way to Woodstock, where Dorothy makes some late-breaking yet unsurprising revelations. The dialogue is breezy, and Tom and Cecily are rendered dynamically, but McCauley loses focus in the overstuffed plot. This has its moments, but it’s not the author’s best. (Nov.)