Rental House softly veers off into less, “Here’s an unrelated concept about the real world that my characters will transparently discuss,” to more, “These are biting details about the specific little weirdos within the textual framework of this book, which is based on reality but isn’t simply a dumping ground for extended referential riffing.” The broad combination of baseline character traits are functionally parody: childless couple; from different cultural backgrounds; Ivy Leaguers; NYC. If this is your first book with all of these concepts, then the first few dozen pages might be memorable. For anyone else who has read contemporary fiction, it’s formulaic–even tedious–in structure, until a thing happens to kind of jolt the Hallmark/Lifetime characterizations off their weathered tracks. Things don’t need to be completely fresh to be interesting—sometimes, taking the well-worn path in the beginning makes getting lost in the woods all the more harrowing.

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