GRETA & VALDIN

Queer siblings in New Zealand deal with complicated romantic lives and with their eccentric relatives.

“We’re all strange, romantic emotional people in this family,” Linsh Vladisavljevic tells his daughter, Greta. She’s just come off a bad date; Linsh has just revealed, for the first time, the story of how he romanced Greta’s mother, Betty. (It involved comparing her to the deep ocean—Linsh is a biologist who specializes in sea fungus.) Greta, a graduate student in literature, lives with Valdin, her equally lovelorn brother, who still pines for his ex-boyfriend and deals with a range of issues from OCD to struggles at his gig hosting a TV travel show. A third sibling, “try-hard” Casper, juggles a wife and two children in the suburbs. While Greta and Val are trying to figure out their own identities as queer people and as mixed-race—Linsh is Russian Moldovan and Betty, a youth theater director, is Māori—they must also navigate their changing relationships with their parents and extended relatives, many of them also queer. (This welcome sprawl beyond the nuclear family mirrors Māori values; Reilly herself is of Ngāti Hine and Ngāti Wai descent.) In the wrong hands this could all be quirk for quirk’s sake, or a half-baked hybrid of Schitt’s Creek and The Royal Tenenbaums. But Reilly’s humor is so riotously specific, and the many moments of true poignancy so gently infused with that same humor, that the Vladisavljevics seem like no one but themselves. As Greta and Valdin come into their own—helped by, and helping, the many weirdos in their lives—readers can root for only one outcome: If Reilly won’t give us a sequel, then we can at least hope she won't make us wait too long for her next novel.

Say hello to your new favorite fictional family.