Family Family

• Author: Laurie Frankel
• Genre: Literary Fiction
• Publication Date: January 23, 2024
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

“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.

A coworker of mine gave me a copy of This Is How It Always Is, and it was such a wonderful, powerful book, that I ended up buying my own copy, and filing Laurie Frankel’s name away as an author to remember. So when this audiobook appeared on NetGalley, I was delighted to be approved for it.

Since it’s an audiobook, I want to focus a little on the narrator, Patti Murin. She was new to me, and wonderful! In this book, she tackles a huge range of characters, both male and female, ranging in age from ten to adults in their thirties, and managed to make all of them sound completely unique. I loved every minute of listening to this audiobook, and will be sure to seek out additional audiobooks narrated by Patti Murin. In addition, there is an author’s note, and a conversation between the author and the narrator at the end of the book.

There’s so many aspects of this book to love, but i’m going to focus on the characters. To start with, Frankel builds an amazing cast of characters, and we get to meet a few of them at various points of their life, allowing us to see them through varying lenses. I’m sure you didn’t think the same at 16 as you did in your 20s or in your 30s, and neither do our characters, so it was really cool to watch them grow so much in one story without it being a huge saga.

The story really centers around India’s experience with adoption. After starring in a movie about adoption, she gives an honest interview about how she feels about the movie, and kind of implodes her career. But she feels the need to be truthful, and her experience as an adoptive mother of twins has colored her view. However, this leads the paparazzi to do some digging and it leads to a whole storm as secrets from her past are revealed.

It’s not easy to write a book with multiple POVs and have some of the chapters be in flashbacks without losing me, especially in audiobook format, but I had zero problems following along with this book. Maybe it was because the voices all sounded so different, courtesy of the narrator, or because the author wrote the characters so differently that each of them had such a unique voice, but it was never difficult to keep the characters separate. 

I quickly found myself caught up in the story, and while it seems juvenile at first, that’s because it’s told through the eyes of a 16-year-old in the beginning. It quickly transitions to a more mature story, where there’s themes of family, love, choice, and bodily autonomy, but also what that means for all the people involved after the decisions are made. I found it fascinating to see how the reverberations of a decision echoed on, as well as seeing how open the parents were with the children about their adoption stories and how they were never made to feel like “adopted children” instead of children, and the parents were just “parents” instead of “adopted parents” vs. “real parents.” In fact, there are multiple instances where this kind of exclusionary language is challenged outright, and it made me want to cheer. 

This is the kind of book that I expected from Laurie Frankel, and she didn’t let me down. She writes a story that pulls a reader in, characters that feel so real it’s easy to get emotionally invested, and a plot that hit me directly in the feels multiple times. By the time I finished this book, I was in happy tears, and after hearing the author’s note, I was crying even more. If you haven’t read a Laurie Frankel book, stop shortchanging yourself and pick one up now.

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