THE FREQUENCY OF LIVING THINGS

A painful, but also drolly original, excavation of family trauma through the perspectives of three sisters and their old-school activist mother.

Jojo and the Twins is a band named after members Emma and Araminta Tayloe, identical twins so similar that Emma attends Ara’s therapy sessions, plus their younger sister, Josephine—who isn’t in the band but might as well be, given her genetic, familial, and self-selected role as everyone’s savior. “Everyone” includes their geographically and emotionally distant mother, Roberta, or Bertie, who when the central dilemma of the story takes place is at sea with a ship full of supplies for refugees in Gaza. Josie, a passionate student of entomology who never finished her doctorate, now cohabitates idly with childhood friend Dean and works at a local butterfly and reptile exhibit. Mostly she keeps tabs on her sisters, whose blockbuster hit “American Mosh” made them rich—until they let the money slip through their fingers along with the years. Now in their mid-30s, Emma and Ara try to get by on occasional paying gigs, and Emma acts as Ara’s bagman, doling out bumps of heroin the way a mom might dole out animal crackers to a toddler. But when Ara and her ex-husband, Roman, try a quick scam, both wind up in jail, Ara in the nearby women’s prison the sisters could once see from their childhood backyard. She’s taken under protection by Bertie’s old friend Janice, in for life due to crimes with the Weathermen in the 1970s, and while Josie spins out with anxiety over Ara’s drug use and Emma’s brain starts to spin with a new concept album titled Jailbreak, Ara gets clean and sober. She’s finally ready to detox from family enmeshment—and then gets tangled up in her bunkmate Kyla’s custody drama. The author’s quick pacing and pitch-perfect details, down to the sisters’ preferred Boston diner, will sustain readers through the anger and loss, on to a satisfyingly real resolution.

Some novels consider what makes a family; this novel instead asks how families of choice function.