In Adults and Other Children, we follow four girls as they navigate from childhood to adulthood. In the tradition of Mary Gaitskill and Lorrie Moore, and with equal parts dark humor and warmth, Miriam Cohen weaves together the girls' stories as their lives intersect in ways both big and small. A little girl's vindictive, and imaginary, nanny casts doubts about the true identity of her new baby sister. A group of friends decide to stop visiting a local charity case, instead spending their time obsessing over the gory details of a spate of recent crimes. A teenager encourages her older sister's deadly eating disorder. A college professor has her boss fired over an imagined sexual assault. A Jewish woman feigns ignorance in her religion, hoping to endear herself to an Orthodox widower.
Time and again, the girls lie and deceive to get what they want -- or what they think they want -- to varying degrees of success. But because we come to understand these girls and, later, women, we find ourselves rooting for them as often as we recoil from them.