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Nothing to See Here

Pages
288
Published
2019
Language
English

Synopsis

Lillian's life has stalled. Bright but adrift, stuck in her mother's house and going nowhere, she is surprised to hear from Madison, the glamorous, wealthy former roommate from the boarding school Lillian was quietly forced to leave years ago.

Madison, now married to an ambitious senator, has an unusual proposition: come and look after her husband's twin children from a previous marriage, Bessie and Roland, who have a singular and inconvenient problem. When the twins get upset, they burst into flames — without being harmed, but setting fire to everything around them.

With Jasper's political career depending on the children being kept quietly out of sight, Lillian moves into the guest house and becomes their improbable caretaker. What begins as a strange summer job slowly becomes something more, as two neglected, combustible children and one aimless young woman form an unlikely, fiercely protective bond.

Kevin Wilson's Nothing to See Here takes an absurd premise and plays it with complete sincerity, mining it for comedy, tenderness, and sharp observations about class, family, and who gets looked after. It is a warm, offbeat novel about caregiving and belonging, and about learning to stop treating yourself as disposable.

How it reads