At first, the storyof Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant sounds all-too-bleakly familiar: twobrothers endure their mother's bitter response to single parenthood. Cody andEzra Tull's mother has been angry at everyone since their father abandoned thefamily. She favors Ezra over Cody, and this shattering unfairness never leavesCody. In a catalogue of grudges, Cody holds terrible thoughts about hischildhood. His successes in finance and in marriage stoke his desperate drive tocompete with and hurt his brother. Ezra, meanwhile, sacrifices his independenceand spends years parenting their mother, poignantly longing to recreate anidyllic version of childhood.

These brothers exist in fiction, but arelike millions of American siblings who shared a childhood in a fatherless family.No one emerges as victorious or saintly or all-rescuing in The HomesickRestaurant, yet the book is profoundly optimistic because it closes on a note ofstability: the siblings mature into young adults, gradually forgiving theanger of their childhoods, and coming to terms with their places in theflow of life.