A whip-smart, entertaining novel about twin siblings who become a national phenomenon after launching a podcast to find the biological father they never knew.
The death of Thomas and Savannah McClair’s mother turns their world upside down. Raised to be fiercely curious by their grandmother Maggie, the twins become determined to learn the identity of their biological father. And when their mission goes viral, an eccentric producer offers them a dream platform: a fully sponsored podcast called The Kids Are Gonna Ask. To discover the truth, Thomas and Savannah begin interviewing people from their mother’s past and are shocked when the podcast ignites in popularity. As the attention mounts, they get caught in a national debate they never asked for—but nothing compares to the mayhem that ensues when they find him.
Cleverly constructed, emotionally perceptive and sharply funny, The Kids Are Gonna Ask is a rollicking coming-of-age story and a moving exploration of all the ways we can go from lost to found.
Advance Praise for The Kids Are Gonna Ask
“Going viral takes on a whole new meaning in this wry and humane look at the unintended consequences of inviting the world into your private life. The Kids Are Gonna Ask is a touching, wonderful novel about the discoveries we make when the simplest questions spark the most complicated answers.”
—Abbi Waxman, bestselling author of The Bookish Life of Nina Hill and Other People’s Houses
“Totally original, filled with quirky and heartfelt characters that leap to life off the page. The Kids Are Gonna Ask explores the complexities of familial love and the search for a biological father that quickly escalates into a national controversy. Gretchen Anthony has her pen on the pulse of today’s social media culture and delivers a page-turning novel that could very well go viral.”
—Renee Rosen, author of Park Avenue Summer
“A smart, engaging send-up of our modern age wrapped up in a story too delicious to put down. With a lovable matriarch, a pair of insightful kids, a spot-on villain and even a ghost or two for good measure, plan to get totally sucked in to the tweets, texts, and podcasts that pepper this funny, heartfelt exploration of what makes us who we are.”
—Kelly Harms, bestselling author of The Overdue Life of Amy Byler
“Not your typical family saga... The Kids Are Gonna Ask is a quirky tale that puts a new spin on the ancestry.com and 23andMe craze by putting one set of siblings’ search for their biological father into the limelight. Anthony captures millennial fervor perfectly in this thoroughly modern story. I truly enjoyed it!”
—Elyssa Friedland, author of The Floating Feldmans
Praise for Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners
“[A] funny, affectionate debut... Part social farce, part family drama, this openhearted, entertaining novel shows an often wrongheaded, annoyingly intrusive but caring matriarch and her family willing to have the difficult, honest conversations needed to work through their misunderstandings and reach harmony.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Anthony’s debut successfully mixes realistic emotional responses to big life events with a sense of humor, preventing any single character from becoming a victim or a villain.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“Overflowing with laughter, emotion, and a bit of mystery.”
—HelloGiggles
“Warm and funny...[with] pitch-perfect dialogue.”
—St. Paul Pioneer Press
“[A] stunning debut... An intricately satisfying story about love and understanding that is full of both nostalgia and surprising optimism.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Brimming with charm and humor and is the perfect fall read.”
—PopSugar, Best Book of Fall 2018 Selection
“Anthony’s debut gently pokes fun at her characters while affirming the supreme importance of family, whatever form that family might take.”
—Booklist
“[A] funny and often poignant look at how one family disintegrates, copes and flourishes, then carries on with life.”
—BookPage
“A masterfully written, Wes Anderson-esque roller coaster ride through a series of self-made disasters in a hilariously dysfunctional family.”
—Kristin Harmel, bestselling author of The Life Intended
“Anthony’s enjoyable debut depicts the dysfunctional, touchingly flawed Baumgartner family...[and] paints a complex portrait of a matriarch struggling to give up control over her daughter’s life, strengthening her family in the process.”
—Publishers Weekly
Gretchen Anthony is the author of Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners, which was a Midwestern Connections Pick and a Best Books Pick by Amazon, BookBub, PopSugar and the New York Post. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Medium and The Write Life, among others. She lives in Minneapolis with her family.
GretchenAnthony.com
The Kids Are Gonna Ask
Gretchen Anthony
To Mom,
who set a magical table for our family.
Contents
July
Book One
One
Two
Three
Text Exchange
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Text Exchange
Eight
Excerpt
Nine
Excerpt
Ten
Excerpt
Eleven
Excerpt
Excerpt
Twelve
Thirteen
Text Exchange
Fourteen
Excerpt
Fifteen
Sixteen
Excerpt
Seventeen
Email
Book Two
Eighteen
Email
Nineteen
Voicemail
Twenty
Email Exchange
Twenty-One
Email Exchange
Twenty-Two
Email Exchange
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Text Exchange
Twenty-Seven
Twitter Exchange
Email
Voicemail
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Email
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Email
Voicemail
Text Exchange
Thirty-Four
Email
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Book Three
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Text Exchange
Forty
Forty-One
Text Exchange
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Blog Post
Forty-Four
Itinerary
Forty-Five
Envelope #2
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Voicemail
Forty-Nine
Text Exchange
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-F
ive
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Letter
Voicemail
Excerpt
Acknowledgments
The Kids Are Gonna Ask—Reader’s Guide
Questions for Discussion
Excerpt from Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners by Gretchen Anthony
July
The house had become an aquarium—one side tank, the other, fingerprint-smeared glass—with Thomas McClair on the inside looking out. There had been a dozen protests outside their home in less than a week, all for the McClairs to—what, enjoy? Critique? Reject? There was no making sense of it.
Tonight, Thomas pulled his desk chair up to the window and kicked his feet onto the sill. He’d been too anxious to eat dinner, but his mind apparently hadn’t notified his stomach, which now growled and cramped. He was seventeen. He could swallow a whole pizza and wash it down with a half-gallon of milk, then go back for more, especially being an athlete. But that was before. Before the podcast, before the secrets, before the wave of national attention. Now he was just a screwup with a group of strangers swarming the parkway across the street from his house because he’d practically invited them to come.
He deserved to feel awful.
The McClairs had been locked in the house for a week, leaving Thomas short of both entertainment and sanity. He had no choice but to watch the show unfolding outside. Stuck in his beige bedroom, with the Foo Fighters at Wembley poster and the Pinewood Derby blue ribbons, overlooking the front lawn and the driveway and the hand-me-down Volvo neither he nor Savannah had driven since last week. There they stood—a crowd of milling strangers, all vying for the McClairs’ attention. All these people with their causes. Some who came to help or ogle. More who came to hate.
Thomas brought his face almost to the glass and tried to figure out the newly assembling crowd. Earlier that day, out of all the attention seekers, one guy in particular had stood out. He wore black jeans, black boots, a black beanie—a massive amount of clothing for the kind of day where you could see the summer heat curling up from the pavement—and a black T-shirt that screamed Who’s paying you? in pink neon. He also held a leash attached to a life-size German shepherd plushy toy.
Some of the demonstrators had gone home for the night, only to be replaced by a candlelight vigil. And a cappella singing. There were only about a dozen people in the group, all women, except for two tall guys in the back lending their baritones to a standard rotation of hymns. “Amazing Grace” first, followed by “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” Now they were into a song Thomas didn’t know, but the longer he listened, he figured hundred-to-one odds that the lyrics consisted of no more than three words, repeated over and over. They hit the last note and raised their candles high above their heads. By daaaaaaaaaaaayyyy.
“No more,” he begged into the glass. “I can’t take any more.”
A week. Of this.
Of protests, rallies and news crews with their vans and satellites and microphones.
Of his sister, Savannah, locked in her room, refusing to speak to him.
Of his grandmother Maggie in hers, sick with worry.
Of finding—then losing—his biodad, the missing piece of his mother’s story. And his own.
Thomas was left to deal with it all. Because he’d started it. And because he was a finisher. And most of all, because it wasn’t over yet.
BOOK ONE
Two months earlier
One
Maggie
If every home has a heart, my family’s beats at our dining room table. Broad, sturdy and claw-footed, it has been the McClair family gathering place for more than a hundred and twenty years.
My great-grandmother was a baby at that table. She learned to pray there, and keep her hands in her lap, and listen more than she spoke. Later, when my grandmother became a mother, she painted the bland maple wood a vibrant red and, in a quiet act of rebellion, told her daughter, “Growing up, I was taught that men carried the conversation, and women carried the dishes. We’re going to do things differently.”
Many years after that, when my mother brought the table into our house, she repainted it, but kept the striking color. “Brown would match the cupboards better,” I suggested. My mother shook her head. “We keep it red for a reason,” she told me. “It’s a reminder. That everyone has a voice, and every voice deserves a place at the table.”
Elizabeth (Bess) McClair
Excerpt, college entrance essay
The day her family’s lives would change forever, Maggie McClair passed through the door from the kitchen and glanced at the dining room wall. Wouldn’t you know, Bess’s essay was crooked again. She walked over and ran a finger down the side of the glass-framed paper, nudging its corners to a perfect ninety degrees. There.
In Maggie’s mind, Bess laughed. Really, Mom? It was only slanted a few degrees. You couldn’t let that be?
Oh, you hush, Maggie scolded, but she was smiling. She continued on her way to retrieve the mail from the front door mail slot.
Maggie loved her house and everything in it. A classic example of Italianate architecture on Lake of the Isles Parkway in Minneapolis, the McClair house was a Fitzgeraldesque treasure. A Gatsby among its peers. Windows tiled like dominoes across the front, living room to dining room. The wooden floors creaked. There was a sunroom circled by lead-glass windows and hallways lined with heavy oak doors and brass doorknobs exhibiting the wear of generations. Only the kitchen had changed and that—with its new appliances and upgraded sink—was merely a face-lift on the house’s Roaring Twenties aesthetic.
The dining room, though, was by far Maggie’s favorite. More than any other place in the house, it’s where her memories lived.
She thought back to the day, twenty-some years ago, she’d hung Bess’s essay there.
“I can’t believe you,” Bess had scoffed, Maggie being an infinite source of amusement to her daughter. “It’s not like I’m Harper Lee or something.” She watched her mother ascend their worn stepladder, hammer in hand.
“You wrote a beautiful testament to our values,” Maggie explained. “And I love it.” She drove a nail into the plaster with a swift one-two.
George had been there, too. Before he was only a memory, back when his heart was still pumping, and he could stand as he always did with his feet wide and his hands on his hips. “I think it’s terrific,” he’d said. “It’s a reminder about the importance of family. Like I always say—” he thrust a declarative finger in the air “—we McClairs will always have enough—”
Bess groaned, but chimed in anyway, joining her father for the chorus. “Because we have each other!”
Maggie descended the last rung of the stepladder and examined her work. The frame tilted a bit to the left and she straightened it. “There. Now it’s perfect.” The three of them stood, shoulder to shoulder, admiring.
“Neither this essay or the red table are to leave this house until I do,” Maggie had proclaimed. “Which is not to happen until I’m toes up and ass down.”
“We know, Mom.”
“Yes, we do,” George said, kissing her cheek and patting her backside. “Nor shall I ever forget how glorious your ass looked up there on that ladder.”
Maggie smacked him playfully on the chest and gave him a kiss.
“I can’t wait to move out.” Bess gagged as she fled the room, leaving her parents alone to coo at each other like teenagers.
Back when they still could.
Maggie sighed and looked at the red table. After her mother died, Maggie brought the table into her own dining room, vowing never to dull its vibrant presence. By then, Maggie and George had owned their house for nearly a decade. Along the way, they traveled and shopped and filled its rooms with treasure. But Maggie had kept the dining room purposefully empty, knowing that someday her family’s ta
ble would take its rightful place there.
Bess had learned the state capitals by laying flash cards on the table’s red surface. Her Brownie troop had spread Elmer’s glue on Popsicle stick crafts there and debated the individual merits of every Girl Scout cookie type. The table had held Bess’s birthday cakes and her mugs of hot chocolate on days when snowstorms canceled school. It hosted her group of high school friends as they gathered for a final farewell dinner before flying away to new lives. Pepperdine. Dartmouth. Michigan. Northwestern. Minnesota.
When George died, Maggie and Bess laid the table thick with offerings for his funeral guests. Prime rib and pasta Bolognese and crab-stuffed mushrooms. More and more, until Bess whispered, “That’s enough now, Mom. We have enough.”
How? Maggie wanted to know. How would she ever have enough without him?
Maggie snapped to when she heard a car pull into the driveway, followed by two slamming doors. Thomas and Savannah were home from school.
She had become a grandmother just over a year after George died, and the work of helping Bess with her twins buried Maggie’s sorrow under piles of spit-up-stained laundry and school permission forms and spelling tests. Bess had given Maggie two tiny McClairs to love—a family of four—which meant that even in Maggie’s quiet moments, when life without George didn’t feel like enough, it was at least plenty.
Until one Thursday afternoon, just after lunch, when Bess died. The accident took her swiftly, when Thomas and Savannah were thirteen. Old enough to have known her, but too young to be without a mother.
Maggie’s friends stepped in where she could not and filled every inch of the table’s red surface with foods meant to reflect life’s joys, rather than its tragedies. White chocolate rosebuds. Buttercream-frosted tea cakes. Salads dotted with lavender and blue pansies straight from the fresh, spring soil.
Maggie had stood at her table that day, not eating, her arms around an inconsolable Thomas and Savannah. But she still believed in the table’s power. In its ability to nourish, and foster, and delight. Even when life, as the McClairs knew it, had ended.
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