Family Family

This book grabbed with its great writing from its first pages. 

This contemporary drama centres around family, adoption and all their varied forms and experiences. If you've met one family who has experienced adoption ... you've met exactly ONE family and their unique experience.

Family Family is filled with delightfully witty humour, a couple of good twists, strong secondary characters and important social messages. Often portrayed as tragic fodder for Hallmark's tearjerker movie-of-the-week, Frankel highlights how adoption has often been stigmatized and negatively portrayed as a last resort to creating a family. 

At the back of my mind as I was reading, I couldn't help but feel that the tone and writing of this story was reminiscent of Taylor Jenkins Reid's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (a book I loved!) with its focus on a strong and determined female main character who goes against the long-held societal expectations put upon women. I loved what India stood for but the secondary characters - in particular 10-year-old Fig and India's mother - overshadowed India and the sections of the story that focused on India's acting career were my least favourite parts of the book. They felt overly long and, despite showing the struggles of a working single mother, took me out of the emotional family aspect.

Well-developed characters that have humour and heart, this contemporary drama has great representation and is uplifting as it digs deep into what makes a family, who makes a family and offers readers thought-provoking tidbits that will instigate wonderful discussion.

If you're looking for a book that will create great discussion in your book club, you've found it.

My Rating: 4.5 stars

Author: Laurie Frankel

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Type and Source: Hardcover from public library

Book Rec by: Bookstagram

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

First Published: January 23, 2024

Book Description from GoodReads: “Not all stories of adoption are stories of pain and regret. Not even most of them. Why don’t we ever get that movie?”

India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward sixteen-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero.

Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do—she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie.

Soon she’s at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi, from protesters on the right and advocates on the left. Her twin ten-year-olds know they need help–and who better to call than family? But that’s where it gets really messy because India’s not just an adoptive mother…

The one thing she knows for sure is what makes a family isn’t blood. And it isn’t love. No matter how they’re formed, the truth about family is this: it's complicated.