Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy

Liars and Saints appears to be an acclaimed novel — but I thought it read like a not-so-great soap opera, with so many unlikely adventures my eyes started to roll midway through the book. The first (big) twist works fine: a very Catholic mother sends her pregnant teenage daughter off to France and then raises the baby as her own. Could be interesting. But when this baby, grown up, proceeds to have an affair with his young niece (who is really his cousin, but they don’t know this) who then has a baby before dying of incurable cancer immediately after his birth, things just don’t make sense anymore, even if this is fiction.

I found the characters of the parents and grandparents, staunch Catholics throughout the morally eventful 20th century, most believable and interesting. The kids are just nuts.