Any Other Family

It took a little while to get going, but after that, the characters started to really develop and to carry the story.

CW: post-partum depression (PPD), discussion of past infertility, IVF procedures and miscarriages

Interesting but frequently frustrating character-driven story of three women who have adopted four siblings (one family is parenting twins). The families, including two couples and one single mom, gather together frequently to keep the children close to each other. As they embark on a two-week summer vacation together, the women learn that the biological mother is pregnant again and that she is asking one of them to adopt her fifth child.

One of the mothers is an overachieving control freak who is eminently punchable, while the other two are more sympathetic (the husbands barely register). The characters exemplify white privilege; issues of class, race and sexuality are rarely mentioned. Although the adoptions are “open,” the birth mother is virtually absent from the story, existing only as a baby-making machine. Wisely, the author lessens the claustrophobic feel of nine people stuck together for two weeks by including several interstitial stories of nameless prospective adoptive parents who demonstrate that there are many paths to the decision to adopt.

Brown is an adoptive parent herself, so she writes from experience about issues of attachment, grief and privacy. The book would have been stronger if the characters, especially the momzilla, were less clichéd and if the bio mom had been more than a plot point.

Tabitha, Elizabeth, and Ginger aren't related by blood or by marriage, but they're indisputably family: they're mothers who find themselves (and, in two cases, their partners) indelibly linked after adopting four biological siblings. They've committed to keeping their kids as close to one another as possible, though they've got wildly different ideas of what that looks like; for example, Elizabeth and Ginger could do without the two-week vacation Tabitha's been eagerly anticipating and voraciously planning (down to the minute) for months.

The format of this book - alternating perspectives from each of the women - worked well. While their personalities occasionally teetered on the caricature-esque (the perfect one! the cool one! the anxious one!), they were inarguably vivid. I suspect most readers will find one of the women most relatable (for me, it was Ginger), but will find elements of themselves in all three. I also loved how Brown interspersed notes - I won't say from whom for fear of spoilers - throughout. However, the overall reading experience felt fairly slow (and I love character-driven fiction, so it's not that); it dragged for me, especially in the middle, and I feel like it would have been stronger had it been 50 pages shorter.

Ultimately, I'd describe it as a beach read with a twist - an interesting exploration of what it means to be a family and how our own childhood hopes and fears never really leave us. I think fans of Gina Sorrell's “The Wise Women” and Therese Anne Fowler's “It All Comes Down to This” will really enjoy it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam for my ARC.