All Families are Psychotic

Hilarious black humour. Dark, dark humour but the satire is buzzing and sparking with ideas. As nearly always, in a Coupland book the ideas are more important than plot or even character, but after just slogging through Don Quixote, this was exactly what I needed.

An enjoyable read which picked up pace as I read it. I liked how the characters were not always as they initially seemed.

Coupland has spent a career infusing the most fun and absurd realities of modern life into his stories of “average Joes” trying to adapt to culture's depleted standards of normalcy and stability. Never defeated, it's fantastic to follow along as his characters—this time, a disparate family oddly reuniting to celebrate their kin's first space-launch—finally give up the ghost and accept their lot as bumbling, mediocre happen-tos, finally daring the world to bring it on. Excellent reading for coming of agers and world-weary loners looking for a blanched ray of hope.