What do you do when your sister moved to Greece, but can’t be found? You go to Greece and help out. While the missing sister might be involved in a romance scam don’t be fooled. The rest of the family has problems too. They are dealing with alcoholism, loneliness, mental health struggles, and the complicated relationships that come with being related to people who know exactly how to push your buttons.

There are a few authors who can write family drama with grace, and Amanda Eyre Ward is one of them. The Perkins family is messy. They make mistakes. They hurt each other. More than once I wanted to grab them by the shoulders and ask what they were thinking.

Yet none of them feel defined by their worst moments.

Ward approaches each character with empathy. Even when they’re making frustrating decisions, you can understand how they got there. She allows them to be flawed without reducing them to their addiction, their illness, or the latest disaster they’ve created for themselves.

Family dramas sometimes lose me when they spend hundreds of pages circling the same problems. Arrivals and Departures kept me invested because the relationships continued to evolve. I wanted to know what would happen to these siblings and whether they could find their way back to one another.

What stayed with me wasn’t the romance scam or the family drama. It was the idea that people can be more than the worst thing they’ve done.