Jackpot Summer is both funny and poignant – a wild and wooly story of four siblings who suddenly get it all and then realize you can’t buy love.

The Jacobson siblings are living their very ordinary, messy lives when they receive a sudden financial windfall. Of meagre means, they grew up saving money and budgeting down to the last penny, so winning the New Jersey lottery should make everything better than it was. But as wiser people have said, mo’ money equals mo’ problems.

The usually at odds siblings have only united to help their father, Leo, pack up the family’s summer home on Long Beach Island ahead of his move to Florida. They succeed in cleaning out the house, though it’s an emotional event. Then the lottery win happens, and changes everything. Only three of the siblings go in on the winning ticket together – Laura, Sophie, and Noah. Matthew is the odd sibling out, agreeing with his wife, Beth, that lotteries are a losing game. When the others win millions, he feels left out, to say the least.

While coping with the sudden publicity of the win, fighting over who should own what, blowing their cash, and dealing with their widowed father’s wisely staying out it of it to become a Floridian pickleball fanatic, the siblings also have difficult personal lives to deal with. Laura is a stay at home mom whose Instagram-perfect marriage is close to toast and shredding to pieces in public; Sophie is dealing with jealousy as her boyfriend’s art career threatens to eclipse her own; regular guy Matthew hates his well-paying but boring job as a lawyer and loathes that it keeps him away from his family and son, and Noah – he of many failed business ventures – has been living at home and can barely keep himself afloat financially.

The Jacobsons must now figure out what family means, try to fix their lives, figure out what to do with the family home – and do it all by themselves, without their late mom Sylvia to guide them. Who will survive?

The family itself, naturally, though it’s touch and go for a while there. Jackpot Summer does a great job balancing each sibling’s point of view, ladling on observational humor, and not sacrificing honesty and emotion in the process.

Each of the siblings has their flaws, and they’re each worth rooting for. All the while, the book has a great message about how money can’t heal your wounds. Jackpot Summer is laugh-out-loud funny and had me chortling along as things became wilder and well-meaning gestures of kindness fell apart. It’s an easy-breezy beach read that will make you smile as you snuggle within its covers.