Streamly Gredible indeed.

Gretchen Ider's parents did not want her. Not her morbidly fat dad before she was born, and not her neurasthenic mother ever since. But Gretty is alive only because her two grandfathers survived Auschwitz, each in their own way: one sharp and ruthless, the other strong and beautiful.  She carries in her something from all her predecessors and carts her mother’s ashes in a plush knapsack.

When we first meet her, motherless Gretty is mourning her gone soulful Obby.  This was her fat dad's Abba who'd written a strange slew of sad kid books most modern parents would find insalubrious for their darling little dears.  These illustrated stories punctuate the novel’s development.

Gretty’s troubled mom had fitfully found purpose working and writing with Obby to inoculate the world against future Holocausts. Eventually, we learn she died by her own hand, perhaps in reaction to discovering her own father, the now "prosperous" Zeyde Z, survived Auschwitz by collaborating with the murderous NAZI system.

Battling fascism is sort of a family business, and Gretty's (enormously so) preoccupied father falls fatally after a massive NAZI hunt on Boston's great green Common. Then she's required to regally oversee the final passage of her remaining grandad: gaunt, crafty Zeyde who’d never left an end loose even if he couldn't pocket it.

Yet Streamly Gredible is not left entirely alone. As much as it burdens her, life ping pongs her forward. In a relatively safe foster home, she’s restlessly charged with her family legacies of strength, smarts, stories - and responsibility.

No Odyssey has more twists and turns than survival.