This is a novel that is big hearted yet unapologetically opinionated. I enjoyed its warmth and somewhat madcap energy. Alongside this, its refusal to hedge or soften its convictions, will make it a Marmite read for some.
Plot in a nutshell
Told across dual timelines, Family, Family follows India from her teenage years through to adulthood, where she is now a successful actor and an adoptive mother of ten-year-old twins. Her carefully managed public life implodes when she gives a journalist her unvarnished thoughts about adoption. Not just a social story she slates the handling of the topic in her latest film. Rather than retreating, India doubles down, with professional and personal consequences.
Meanwhile, her twins decide to help. Their plan involves contacting a family member India doesn’t know they’re aware of, and whom they have never met in person, setting off a chain of events that brings past and present into collision.
Thoughts
There is a lot going on here. At times the novel edges into what might fairly be called an issues book, and India is nothing if not opinionated. Her views on teen pregnancy, abortion, adoption, and the expectations placed on mothers are expressed with confidence and little self-doubt, often to her detriment.
Reading as a Brit, I occasionally struggled with plausibility. In particularl around how the US adoption system appears to function (or get by). There were moments where I had to take a healthy pinch of salt to stay invested. Readers less inclined to do so may find themselves pulled out of the story altogether.
Frankel is writing from lived experience, and that matters, but it also limits. This is very clearly one perspective on adoption, and one that largely resists acknowledging trauma. For some readers, that choice will feel refreshing; for others, it may seem to oversimplify or sidestep the grief and long-term impact that many people experience with adoption. There are sections where the lack of nuance makes the novel emotionally and perhaps even ethically difficult. Not because of what it says, but because of what it leaves unexamined.
The same is true of the book’s antagonists. The pro-life movement, in particular, is drawn in broad strokes and dispatched with relish. Their eventual comeuppance will likely divide readers between those who find it quietly satisfying and those who find it offensive.
And yet, this is not a novel lacking heart. It is often poignant and sincere in its exploration of what makes a family, and especially in its attention to different experiences of motherhood. The men in the novel are kind and supportive but oddly sidelined. The men in her life appear to primarily be there to give India the space to make her own choices. This may be intentional, but it contributes to the sense of a world shaped almost entirely around a single loud perspective.
But love did not preclude strife. It did not erase sorrows. It did not detangle complication. In the case of families, uncomplicated wasn’t really the goal anyway.
The younger characters, by contrast, are vividly drawn. Fig, in particular, stands out: a child clearly traumatised and frightened of almost everything. Yet she is repeaedly willing to face those fears to protect the people she loves. The children are often laugh-out-loud funny, even as their questionable decision-making had me muttering under my breath and hoping someone, somewhere, might be willing to keep a closer eye on them.
Ultimately, Family, Family is a book you can read in more than one way. I chose to enjoy it as a moving, funny, fiercely personal story about chosen families.