Outwardly, they look like any other family: four kids spread across three households (which include two couples, one single mom) coming together for Sunday dinners, birthdays and holidays. But in Eleanor Brown's insightful third novel, Any Other Family, the dynamics are unconventional and complicated. The kids (a tween, seven-year-old twins and a not-quite-one-year-old) are biological siblings, adopted by three previously unconnected families. The parents--especially Tabitha, former event planner and now mom to the twins--work hard to make sure their kids feel loved and can sustain deep relationships with one another. But on their first-ever group vacation in Aspen, their bonds will be tested as long-simmering secrets and new challenges rise to the surface.
Brown (The Light of Paris) unspools the story through multiple perspectives, switching between Tabitha, who orchestrated the vacation and is determined to make it fabulous; Ginger, the introverted single mother who is wary of forced closeness; and Elizabeth, who desperately wanted a child but is finding motherhood with a new baby miserable. Although Tabitha's husband, Perry, and Elizabeth's husband, John, play important supporting roles in the family, Brown's keen eye is focused on the women: their individual struggles, the complex dynamic among them and the ways they all must balance their fierce love for their children with the family baggage they each carry.
Brown's characters, especially Elizabeth, are open about the challenges of motherhood: the constant worry about getting it right, the new tasks and roles to navigate, the bone-deep weariness. But they are also open about the joys: Ginger savors her bond with tween Phoebe, who calls her "Marmee"; Tabitha delights in the twins' robust physicality and their sheer energetic exuberance. All three mothers appreciate the strange gifts of this family, even while they sometimes wish they could escape from it.
As Brown writes in her author's note, adoption is a huge, multilayered subject, and this one slice, focused narrowly on several families dealing with domestic, open adoptions, leaves out many of the larger forces affecting adoptive families. But her characters wrestle convincingly and compassionately with the challenges of their particular experience. Among these: the social energy it takes to maintain any large family, especially an unconventional one; the older children's questions about why their birth mother, Brianna, didn't feel she could parent them; and the ways they all struggle to balance setting boundaries and asking for what they need.
Thoughtful, compelling and ultimately hopeful, Any Other Family asks hard and necessary questions about adoption, privilege and what truly makes a family. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams
Shelf Talker: Eleanor Brown's insightful third novel explores the loving but complicated dynamics of an unconventional adoptive family.