A lightweight, droll novel about an aging grandmother with a penchant for shoplifting, her beleaguered son who is sandwiched between gnarly teenaged children, an overachieving wife, and his mother’s continuing scrapes with law enforcement, and one teenaged daughter in particular whose rebelliousness is insatiable. Grandma’s British snarkiness carries the story along even when her exploits teeter into the unbelievable making for, as the Washington Post review described it, a pleasant story when you need an antidote to today’s daily trauma.