“Riotous. . . . Franzen-esque. . . . Hilarious . . . impeccably written. . . . His comic assurance . . . is reminiscent of Meg Wolitzer. . . . Ridker[’s] characters make mistakes, but they pay the price, recover and grow. . . . [T]hey soldier on and try not to lose hope. Just as we hold ours that this talented writer will keep gifting us with his intelligent, bighearted, spew-your-gefilte-fish-funny novels."—Cathi Hanauer, The New York Times Book Review

“Absorbing . . . a vivid depiction of modern American life. . . . The novel is at once propulsive and immersive, powered by one tragicomic episode after another, right up until its final tension-filled paragraph. . . . A writer with this much talent can take his readers anywhere.”—Malcolm Forbes, The Washington Post

“A comedy of (bad) manners—the tale of a secular Jewish family in Brookline who undermine their own prosperity and happiness with a slew of bad decisions. . . . Engaging reading. . . . As these characters struggle over money and love—what other plots are there? — they stumble, fall, and gradually, tentatively, begin to right themselves.”—The Boston Globe

“This comic novel, about a year of crisis for an affluent Jewish family, opens with a dinner party at which each guest is served a meal representing a different socioeconomic background. According to the hostess, Deborah, the matriarch, the purpose of this exercise is ‘to replicate, in a controlled environment, the lottery of birth.’ Yet the control of the family’s own environment becomes a problem after Deborah’s husband, Scott, is caught falsifying data in a clinical trial. . . . Ridker’s tone remains light even as his characters struggle to correct course. Writing about psychiatry’s new interest in the ‘transgenerational transmission of trauma’ in his medical-school application, the son wonders, ‘Who knows what else our parents have unwittingly passed on?’”—The New Yorker