A Perfectly Reasonable Plan : A Novel

The plan was simple. Everything else was not.

Six-year-old Adalia Wright has an unusual way of processing grief. She buries dolls in the backyard. She reads National Geographic for tips on Aboriginal and Aztec death rituals instead of reaching for storybooks. And she has recently attempted to mummify the family cat in vegetable oil and towels--an indignity the cat, for the record, thoroughly enjoyed.

Her grandmother Winnie has had enough. Convinced Adalia would be better off with her maternal grandparents, she rounds up her husband Abe and her two elderly siblings, loads everyone into an aging van, and sets off cross-country. A two-day drive. A perfectly reasonable plan.

Nothing about it is reasonable.

What begins as a straightforward trip accumulates, almost against its will, a socially anxious stranger, a prickly hedgehog, and a three-legged rescue dog. Mechanical failures pile up. Wrong turns multiply. Siblings revolt. And somewhere between heartbreak and hilarity, Winnie begins to wonder whether she had the whole thing backward all along--and whether the stubborn, peculiar little girl she was desperate to let go might be the very thing holding her heart together.

Darkly comic, warm-hearted, and sneakily wise, A Perfectly Reasonable Plan is a story about the families we''re given, the ones we accumulate along the way, and the wonderful love that refuses to stay behind.