The Hole We're In

“Equal parts sharply funny and sobering, Zevin’s portrait of a family in financial free fall captures the zeitgeist.”—People

Meet the Pomeroys: a church-going family living in a Texas college town. Roger, the patriarch, has impulsively gone back to school, while his wife, Georgia, has been feeding the bill drawer with unopened envelopes for months. In an attempt to climb out of the holes they’ve dug, Roger and Georgia make a series of choices that have catastrophic consequences for their three children—especially for Patsy, the youngest, who will spend most of her life fighting to overcome them. The Hole We’re In shines a spotlight on over-reliance on credit, gender and class politics, and the war in Iraq, but it is Zevin’s deft exploration of the fragile economy of family life that makes this a book for the ages.