Ahhhh – Thanksgiving!  That quintessential celebration of parades, mashed potatoes, Detroit Lions football, and family squabbling.  We’re celebrating with my folks, as usual, and anticipating a quiet and peaceful holiday.  But if you’re already gritting your teeth in anticipation of a shouting match over the pumpkin pie, here are three stories of family drama, featuring a spectrum of heroes and heroines from passive to feisty.

The Blue Castle, by L. M. Montgomery – Valancy Sterling is the heroine we all need.  Twenty-nine, unmarried, living under the thumb of her domineering mother and a slew of disapproving relatives, Valancy’s entire grim existence changes when she receives a diagnosis of a terminal heart condition.  Determined not to waste any more time of the year-odd remaining to her, Valancy decides she is going to say what she’s thinking and please herself for the first time in her life.  Her staid, stiff relatives are shocked, shocked I tell you, when Valancy’s wit and snark comes out for the first time at a family dinner.  They react in true Ron Burgundy stunned style – Baxter, I’m not even mad, that’s amazing – and the shocks keep coming as Valancy takes herself off to keep house for a local ne’er-do-well and his disgraced daughter, then pulls the biggest surprise of all.  The Blue Castle is required reading for anyone who has ever wanted to lob a grenade right into the middle of the Thanksgiving table.

The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse – If you have ever had a domineering aunt, Bertie Wooster’s plight will be so real it hurts.  Really hurts, because Bertie has not one, but two, of those estimable relatives.  Aunt Agatha is sternly proper and upright, constantly despairing of Bertie’s flighty nature, embarrassing friends, and apparent failure to close the deal with any of the upper class young women she selects for his bride.  Aunt Dahlia seems better, at first, but she can’t seem to help herself enlisting Bertie in her schemes – of revenge against people who have slighted her, to keep her cook Anatole in good spirits, or for funding for her self-published magazine Milady’s Boudoir.  This despite having no great opinion of Bertie’s mental faculties.  In The Code of the Woosters it’s Aunt Dahlia who is the bane of Bertie’s existence – sending him into deep undercover to steal a cow-creamer.  Fortunately, Bertie has the incomparable Jeeves at his side, and all will be set to rights.  Are you intrigued?  Of course.  And look at it this way – when your aunts and uncles are driving you crazy over the Thanksgiving table, at least you can be thankful that none of them have ever manipulated you into committing petty larceny, probably.

 Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell – Families are complicated, right?  And it only gets more complicated when you start adding step-parents and step-siblings into the mix, as the widower Doctor Gibson discovers when he decides – in a panic after his daughter attracts a suitor for the first time in her life – that what young Molly needs most is a mother to guide her.  He doesn’t bother to ask young Molly what she thinks of this plan (or to let her in on the secret crush that he intercepts) and he doesn’t make the best choice of a second wife, either.  Hyacinth Clare Kirkpatrick, former governess to the local earl’s daughters, is self-centered and a bit ridiculous.  Really, the only benefit to the new Mrs. Gibson is that she comes with a daughter, Cynthia, who proves to be a built-in pal for Molly.  Cynthia is beautiful and high-spirited, and she tends to suck up all the local male attention, but Molly adores her and Cynthia’s great redeeming characteristic is that she adores Molly, too.  Of course she introduces all sorts of complications, but it’s a Victorian novel, so what else can you expect?

There you have it – three stories of feisty families to make you grateful that you don’t have a raft of stick-in-the-mud cousins, an aunt with criminal leanings, or a stepmother who schemes to marry your stepsister off to the local squire’s son.  Unless you do have one or all of these family situations, in which case my advice is: bourbon.