They May Not Mean To, but They Do

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, June 2016

The title of Cathleen Schine’s new novel riffs on Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse,” which explores the inevitability of parent-child dysfunction (though Larkin used much blunter language). A deeply affecting yet very funny intergenerational novel, They May Not Mean To, but They Do examines the upending of…