Both a family history and an exploration of the complications of women attempting to tell their stories, We are the Kings follows Marcella as she grieves the death of her grandmother, unearths family secrets, and refuses to settle for a predictable life or a boring man.
Halfway through what should have been a romantic trip to South Africa, 30-year-old Marcella ruins everything, perhaps intentionally, though even she isn't quite sure. She returns to New York to learn that her beloved grandmother Adele has died. Adele's body was found not far from her late husband's grave, by the father of her first child, a relationship Marcella and her family had previously known nothing about and now must come to terms with.
No longer employed, and her trip an abject failure, Marcella does what she's always done. She hightails it to Adele's house, a Gilded Age mansion filled with ghosts both figurative and literal. Only slightly humbled by her current circumstances, and drinking no more than is reasonable, Marcella staves off her grief by attempting to understand who exactly Adele had been. She is intermittently aided in this effort by the women in her family, which, unsurprisingly, only obscures things further. Marcella's mother and aunt, a painter and a historian, who came of age amidst the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, see things one way, while her older sisters, each with her own set of problems, including problems with each other, have an entirely different perspective. Marcella's maternal grandmother, a daughter of Jewish immigrants now in her 80s, perhaps the least likely of them to empathize with a woman she'd once considered her rival, and a WASP no less, has perhaps the most nuanced view of Adele, which makes no sense. Except that it does.
Marcella does not resolve her romantic predicaments by the close of the novel, and the mysteries of Adele's life remain, for the most part, impenetrable. But in sifting through her family's conflicting and fading memories, Marcella puts into words what no one else will say out loud, revealing not only what may or may not have happened, but what's truly at stake when a woman tells her story.
