A woman drives out of Los Angeles to a Best Western in the high desert, supposedly to work on her novel, but actually to get away from her father, who’s been in the ICU for months and died and been brought back twice, and her husband, whose chronic illness keeps getting worse. She’s not escaping any of it. The front desk clerk points her at a hiking trail, where she finds a saguaro the size of a building, which is impossible, since saguaros don’t grow in the Mojave. There’s a split down its side. She climbs in. Inside, she meets her father as a boy, and then her husband as a boy. The third time she goes looking for the cactus, she can’t find it, walks farther out, and gets lost for real. It is the funniest book anybody has written about nearly dying of thirst—especially delicious since it’s set in my backyard. I do not want to read books about grief (there’s enough of it IRL, thank you very much), but I did enjoy this one.