Family Family
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Frankel's exuberant if didactic latest (after One, Two, Three), an actor and adoptive mother faces online backlash over her new movie. India Allwood stars in Flower Child as a woman who gave up her daughter for adoption as a teen. After she and the film are accused on social media of capitalizing on others' trauma (the movie suggests the characters' drug addictions are the result of the adoption), she is unapologetic. Her adopted daughter, Fig, a fifth-grader, wants to help her mother, and she believes the public needs to know about Rebecca, the daughter India gave up for adoption as a teen. Fig tracks down Rebecca, now a headstrong teenager, online, but it turns out she has her own story to tell. She does so in a video that goes viral, further complicating the controversy around India and Flower Child. The emphasis on India's strong opinions often makes the novel feel like a soapbox for Frankel, who has written in an author's note and elsewhere about being an adoptive mother. (In one scene, India insists that a birth mother's choice to give up her child can lead to a "win-win" situation for the birth mother and the child.) Still, Frankel offers a hilarious and sobering view of adoptive parenting through her portrayals of the cheerful and honest India and Rebecca's open-minded adoptive mother, who pledges to tolerate top 40 music, because she recognizes that "shitty but trendy music was an unfortunate but unavoidable stage of adolescence." When Frankel's not banging her drum too hard, this is great fun.
