Any Other Family

Eleanor Brown

Description

Written by the author of The Weird Sisters which was a NYT and LA Times bestseller (more than half a million copies sold). A moving family narrative, smart, upmarket women’s fiction with its enthralling take on motherhood, family relationships, adoption, and parenting.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Family Life
• Sagas
• General
• The Women
• Anne Tyler
• Woman
• General officer
• Ann Patchett
• Women

Informations

• Publié par: Legend Press
• Date de parution: 12 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781915054487
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

What a pleasure to read this smart, original, wholly satisfying portrait of the good people who, through adoption, became one big, not-always compatible family. The plot thickens: who should adopt the yet-again-pregnant birth mother s next baby? Eleanor Brown s beautiful writing, brilliant concept, and deliciously wry point of view spins that question into a big-hearted page-turner.
Elinor Lipman, author of Good Riddance and Rachel to the Rescue
Brown brings compassion and insight to exploring the hopes and vulnerability that make us first human, then family. Highly compelling.
Isabel Costello, author of Scent
Funny, wise, heartbreaking, and heart-mending, Any Other Family explores what it means to be a family, in all its messy complication. Emotionally complex, immensely readable, and deeply affecting.
Christina Baker Kline, 1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train and The Exiles
Any Other Family offers deeply necessary insight into adoption, non-traditional families, and too-little discussed topics like postpartum depression in adoptive parents and grief associated with infertility, but beyond that, it is a beautifully written, elegantly assembled exploration of the joys and complications of family, any family, no matter what it looks like.
Laurie Frankel, New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is
Eleanor Brown writes relationships within families so well. I adored this story.
Nina Pottell
Rewarding Brown has a sure hand in portraying the adoptive women; their smart, lively dialogue sparks as the characters try to define the boundaries of a family. Overall, Brown entertains with her colorful cast and engaging conceit.
Publishers Weekly
Told in the alternating perspectives of the three adoptive mothers and interspersed with written adoption applications from eager parents-to-be, the novel moves thoughtfully, precisely, and sometimes humorously through the psyches of the parents, pushing the readers into the quick-paced, perfectly detailed story while never forgetting the looming questions of family and belonging. A prismatic story of family, adoption, and how the people we choose to keep close shape who we are.
Kirkus Reviews
Brown s exploration of what makes a family creates an engrossing read.
Booklist

Legend Press Ltd, 51 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6HJ
[e-mail] | www.legendpress.co.uk
Contents Eleanor Brown 2022
The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
Print ISBN 9781915054470
Ebook ISBN 9781915054487
First published in the US in 2022 by G. P. Putnam s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC | www.penguinrandomhouse.com
Cover Design by Grace Han
Cover art Rachel Campbell / Bridgeman Images
All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Eleanor Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters and The Light of Paris , and the editor of the anthology, A Paris All Your Own . She holds an MA in Literature and teaches writing workshops at writing conferences and centers nationwide. Born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Eleanor lives with her family in Highlands Ranch, Colorado.
For Liz, who knows.
There was once a woman who wished very much to have a little child, but she could not obtain her wish. At last she went to a fairy, and said, I should so very much like to have a little child; can you tell me where I can find one?
Oh, that can be easily managed, said the fairy. Here is a barleycorn of a different kind to those which grow in the farmer s fields, and which the chickens eat; put it into a flower-pot, and see what will happen.
- T HUMBELINA, BY H ANS C HRISTIAN A NDERSEN

PROLOGUE
THEY LOOK LIKE any other family. A real one: cousins, siblings, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters. They look like any other family with a past, with shared stories and traditions and jokes, memories of childhood summers and hundreds of holidays, carrying old wounds and the echoes of kept and broken promises.
But they are not like any other family, not exactly.
Does that mean they are not a family at all? Each of them stumbles over the word occasionally, searching for the right label to explain their relationships to outsiders, never feeling quite understood, not quite certain themselves of what the right term for this is.
Still, that name, family , is as close as they have found. They are a family, formed by three sets of parents who adopted from the same group of biological siblings.
Once upon a time, there were three children: Phoebe, the eldest at five, and the twins, not-quite-toddlers. When their grandmother, who had been raising them, died, there was no one else to turn to. Their mother, Brianna, had been so young when she had them, was more like a sibling to them than a parent, and was no more prepared to care for them than she had been when they were born.
As the social workers began casting about for options - fostering? adoption? - little Phoebe took her own destiny in hand and asked to live with Ginger. This was a surprise to everyone, most of all Ginger herself, whose only connection to Phoebe was her volunteer work in Phoebe s kindergarten class as a reading tutor. But she had fallen for Phoebe in the same way the child had fallen for her, and she was happy to open her home.
Tabitha and Perry, who had married later in life and were hoping to build their family through adoption, were asked if they would care for the twins, busy and curious and energetic, an exhausting joy. They had just completed their home study and were surprised but delighted to have Tate and Taylor come home with them so quickly.
Splitting up siblings who got along so very well and had already lost so very much was generally seen as a less-than-ideal arrangement, but when Tabitha suggested a new way of thinking of it - the children living in different houses but still raised as siblings - the social worker and the judge and, most important, Brianna embraced the plan, and so they became one family and many families at the same time.
Tabitha has always loved the idea of this magical new thing they were making. It was what she had been dreaming of her entire lonely childhood and beyond: being part of a big, happy family. They all come together to celebrate birthdays with pi atas and cake in the backyard, to share gratitude at Thanksgiving, and to have dinner every Sunday night, including Brianna, when she can make it.
Ginger, who came from a complicated family and escaped it as soon as humanly possible, likes this familial closeness rather less, even though she believes firmly, agrees entirely, that keeping the siblings as close as possible is the right thing for the children. She had never thought she would be a mother at all, and it couldn t have happened any other way. Sometimes Ginger considers the millions of decisions that led her to exactly that place so she could catch Phoebe as she fell from the sky, and marvels at the happenstance that brought her this child.
It is only that after spending her entire adulthood building a life of happy solitude, in addition to motherhood, she has inherited a complete set of quasi-relatives. Sometimes Ginger feels as if she spends all her time going back and forth to Tabitha and Perry s house (everything happens there, of course). When the parents were first working out the boundaries and rules of this tiny nation they were forging, they had committed to weekly family dinners and holidays together as their baseline. Now it seems to have grown far beyond that, especially since Violet arrived.
Ah, yes, Violet.
They had been a semi-family for four years when Brianna called Tabitha to say she was pregnant again. The children s biological father had come back into Brianna s life, and she hoped this time, now that they were older, they might stay together, raise this child.
He had managed to stay until Brianna was seven months along and then disappeared, as everyone else had known he would. The parents keep their mouths shut on the topic of Justin. He is, after all, the father of their children, but he is also nobody s favorite person because he has broken Brianna s and the children s hearts too many times.
So there was Brianna, alone, twenty-four and pregnant again. She cried and told Tabitha she couldn t do it, couldn t parent this child, she absolutely couldn t do it; what was she going to do?
And so came Elizabeth and John. They were young, or relatively so, having met in college, married immediately after, and then spent several painful years trying to have a child. When they adopted Violet, they went from the fog of fertility treatments straight into the fog of parenting a newborn. The adoption happened so quickly, and Violet was a colicky baby, angry and red-faced, for months that felt like years, an endless, stumbling routine of nighttime feedings. The colic has passed, but Elizabeth is still so tired, so overwhelmed, she hardly knows what happened.
All of which is to say that if anyone asks Elizabeth what she feels about their Very Special Family, she might look blank for a moment, as if trying to remember a distant acquaintance, then shrug.
Theirs is a strange way to become a family, each of the mothers has thought at some point, though ho