Family Family - Laurie Frankel - ★★★★

AUTHOR: Laurie Frankel

NARRATOR: Patti Murin

GENRE: Contemporary Fiction.

RATING: 4 stars.

In a Nutshell: A contemporary drama that highlights a special family, and what makes it a family, and even what IS a ‘family’. Dragged a little bit in between, but overall, I loved how thought-provoking this read was. Definitely recommended!

Plot Preview:

India Allwood has always wanted to be an actor. Her dreams start to come true at sixteen when she joins a drama course, and then gets a role on Broadway and later, as the lead of a TV superhero series.

Her new movie is a story of adoption, the kind of story that has been depicted multiple times before. So when a journalist asks India’s opinion about it, she honestly states that the movie isn’t good.

This creates an uproar, and India is soon at the centre of a media storm, battling all kinds of accusations about her position on adoption. This is when India’s ten-year-old twins, Fig and Jack, step in to help by calling up the family.

Who else is in this family?

Ah… that’s where it gets complicated!

The story comes to us through the third person perspective of various characters, and in a dual timeline – one contemporary and the other beginning in 1998 and leading up to present time.

Having recently read and adored Laurie Frankel’s ‘This Is How It Always Is’, I had very high expectations from this one. While it may not have worked to the same level, it still offered plenty of satisfaction.

Bookish Yays:

😍 I loved how the book highlights that family isn’t necessarily father + mother + child. There are n number of combinations possible, and no specific combo makes a family better or worse.

😍 We see adoption from a very different viewpoint herein. To be clear, this novel is not THE story of adoption; rather, it is A story of adoption. This is most important to understand. My mind rebelled at times while listening to this book as it kept chiming, ‘This is not how an adoption story is supposed to go.’ But then I realised that this is exactly the point of the author – that there is no single adoption story!

😍 Just as in the above-mentioned novel that deals with a transgender child, the author doesn't generalise the solution nor promote India’s actions as universally true or necessary or justified. There are no judgemental remarks about what should be done or should have been done, but just a mention of what the characters did.

😍 A great chunk of the story in both timelines comes to us from the perspective of children. I found this interesting as we get to see varied troublesome events through innocent eyes and hence, through a filtered point of view.

😍 Fig was my favourite character. She sounds too grown-up for a typical ten-year-old, but as the author says in her parting note, not every ten year old is necessarily childish, and I agree. Fig reminded me a lot of how my elder daughter was at ten (except for the trauma), so it was somewhat nostalgic to see her stumble through big words and try to handle mature situations in what she thought was the best approach.

😍 Through India’s acting career, we get excellent insights about life for actors in theatre and on television. It felt so authentic that I googled to see if Frankel was an actress as well.

😍 A small part of the book is set during the COVID pandemic and the resultant lockdown. I quite liked how the impact of the pandemic was depicted in the story. (That said, readers who are sensitive about the COVID might not like this section.)

😍 The author’s note is again eye-opening, where she reveals her own experiences as an adoptive mother.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

😐 The goody-goody characters: Don’t get me wrong. I liked almost all of the characters in this book, but the problem was exactly that: all of them are too likeable. There was not a single negative character. Without going into spoilers, all I can say is: there were many scenes where a character could have been angry or accusatory or argumentative, but in this book, almost everything is resolved with barely an increase in the decibel level.

😐 The storyline drags somewhat in between. Thankfully, this wasn’t so bad on audio, but I still felt like the same topics were being repeated time and again. The start and the end were mostly good.

Bookish Nays:

😟 Some of the character actions are too farfetched to digest without complaining. Not a single character (bar Fig) seems to have trauma from their past, which is questionable, and has no grouses in the present, which is unlikely. The whole book goes by too smoothly to feel realistic.

😟 The dialogues seem somewhat stilted at times, especially when the conversations involved only two people. The flow felt jumpy.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at almost 15 hours, is narrated by Patti Murin. She does a pretty wonderful job of ensuring that each character sounds distinct without going overboard in her accents and voices.

The audiobook includes the author’s note (Thank you, Macmillan! Rarely do we ARC listeners get to hear the author’s note in the audio!) It also has a bonus interview between the author and the narrator. This was quite enlightening for me, both in terms of the writing process as well as the narration process. If ever anyone thought that narrating an audiobook is just picking up a book and reading into a mic, they need to hear this interview. I also learnt that narrators cannot always sing any included songs in the audio version as the song rights need to be purchased separately. Wow!

All in all, despite the little niggles I had, I still enjoyed this story. We are so used to seeing the negative kind of adoption narrative that this overly positive portrayal feels odd, untrue, unacceptable. But in the realm of adoptive permutations and combinations, this story is also plausible. As the author states, ‘Representation matters but positive representation matters more.’

Definitely recommended to readers who enjoy books that make them ponder the what-ifs and why-nots. This would also make a great book-club read.

My thanks to Macmillan Audio for the ALC of “Family Family”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.