Breakaway Books

Authored by Weike Wang; Published December 2024; Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

Are holidays the very bane of your existence? Do you live in perpetual dread of the week or two every year that you spend in the company of the pack of wolves that raised your partner? Do you want to feel like you’re not alone in that feeling? Perhaps Rental House is for you.

In Rental House, we see married couple Nate and Keru host their in-laws: first their parents on Cape Cod and then Nate’s brother Ethan in upstate New York. Over the course of these vacation weeks, the gorge between the generations looms large, as well as their significant cultural differences. Nate and Keru do their best to survive their own families even as they politely tolerate their in-laws.

This novel is maybe a little good at capturing the overwhelming awkwardness of having to spend long periods of time with your in-laws: having the front row seat to view the somewhat appalling behavior of another family and not being quite close enough to do anything about it. Nate and Keru took on different approaches to their own parents—Nate with an aggressive approach and Keru a more submissive one—but their exceedingly polite interactions with their in-laws mirror each other. I could feel anxiety rising in my chest throughout the novel, cringing at the racism and ignorance on display, and praying that my own interactions with my in-laws bear no resemblance to this book. 

Nate and Keru themselves became a subject of fascination for me over the course of the novel. Watching how differently they walk through life, it made me wonder how they chose each other as long-term partners. (Incidentally, Keru’s bizarre penchant for throwing things at inappropriate times was probably the only quirk that made me chuckle throughout this novel.) For the most part, I didn’t see them growing together as a couple—in fact, at times, I was frustrated by their lack of communication—right until the very end, when Keru sternly dedicated herself to keeping the familial relationship with Ethan intact. It surprised me, both because I found Ethan infuriating and because it seems much more acceptable in this age to cut off those family relationships that don’t suit us. At the end of the novel, I still felt like I was grasping for a better understanding of what this family was supposed to be.

For all that it takes place in paradisaical locations, Rental House is no vacation treat. Do not bring it along for a light beach read—instead, consider it a meditation on familial and in-law relationships.