Cassandra at the Wedding

From Buddenbrooks to Growth of the Soil to One Hundred Years of Solitude to Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, my all-time favorite novels are family stories, so it follows that the best book I've read so far this year is the queer family reissue Cassandra at the Wedding [and Kindle]. Bright, musical twin sisters from Berkeley -- charming, erratic, lesbian Cassandra and the steadier, hetero Judith -- join their academic father and doting grandmother at their ranch in the Sierras. They all still mourn the girls' brilliant mother ('who was more like a little brother") but it's supposed to be a happy weekend with Judith getting married to a nice doctor from Connecticut... until, well, things happen. The To The Lighthouse structure of the first and third sections bracketing a shorter, more actiony middle is nearly as elegant as the timeless prose. It was written in 1962 by Dorothy Baker whose two other novels are the jazzy Young Man with a Horn, which became the Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day movie, and the "difficult" Trio, which Hollywood wouldn't touch because it's so very queer.