MODERN LOVERS by Emma Straub

Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers follows lifelong friends Elizabeth, Andrew, and Zoe as they navigate marital and parenting woes in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park neighborhood. Lighthearted yet insightful, Modern Lovers explores how people and relationships inevitably change over time, even when you’ve lived down the street from your best friends for decades. The characters don’t always make it easy to love them — especially Andrew, with his maddening devotion to a suspicious new co-op/yoga center/kombucha brewery in the neighborhood — but Straub writes them so well one can’t help but be drawn in to their insulated little world. The contrast between the adults dealing with longstanding relationship issues and their teenage children experiencing love for the first time adds a nice depth to the novel (as well as plenty of room for humorous antics on both sides). Modern Lovers is just about the perfect summer read.