Friday, September 9, 2022

Any Other Family

Any Other Family
by Eleanor Brown
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2022. 354 pages. Fiction

When three different families adopt biological siblings, they commit to keeping the siblings as connected as possible. This means family dinners on Sundays, weekly playdates, spending holidays together, and a two week family vacation in Aspen. But not everything is smooth sailing. Each family has their own boundaries, personalities, and struggles, and learning to meld into a single family unit isn't easy. When the group receives word that the birth mother is pregnant again and looking for another adoptive family, the delicate bonds these families are forming threaten to collapse.

Any Other Family is a character-driven story that I found I could relate to even though I don't know anything about the world of adoption. Told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of the three main female characters, each woman's personality and inner struggles melds and blends with the driving plot point to deepen the premise into something more. While Brown isn't quite as successful in fleshing out the men and the birth mother, I still found this story to be heartwarming, sad, happy, frustrated, confused, and hopeful all at once. Brown separates the novel into sections by interspersing the files of the new baby's prospective adoptive families throughout; a touch I especially liked. This is an engaging tale of the creation of an atypical family.

If you like Any Other Family you might also like:

by Emily Giffin
Ballantine Books, 2016. 384 pages. Fiction

Meredith thought she'd done it all rightmarried the perfect man, had the perfect daughterbut as she grows increasingly restless, she can't help but wonder if she got the love part wrong. Josie has been happily single for years, but she wants a child of her own so much she's one bad Match.com date away from heading straight for the baby carriage all on her own. The sisters, whose relationship was strained by the tragic death of their older brother over a decade ago, find that they need each other more than they realized.

by Alison Fairbrother
Random House, 2022. 275 pages. Fiction

Twentysomething Ellie was sure he would leave her his most prized possession, a baseball with which they played catch, and which sat on his desk, as a kind of inspiration: her poet father's most famous poem was called "The Catch." But when her father's will is read, his children, including from other marriages, each receive a meaningful object, except Ellie, who receives a glow-in-the-dark tie rack that she has never seen before. The baseball that inspired her father's work is left to someone with initials no one recognizes, L.M. Determined to try to understand her father's life and to overcome her sense of abandonment, Ellie sets out to track down L.M. In her quest she discovers many startling things about who her father really was and comes to realize the deeper meaning of that baseball, that poem "The Catch," and the many ways life catches us unawares.

by Cathleen Schine 
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. 258 pages. Historical Fiction

Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins, share an obsession with words. As adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation begins to push them apart. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition.

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