The other members:
Becky from Sydney of Aidanvale
Kate from Melbourne of booksaremyfavoriteandbest
Naomi from Canada of Consumed By Ink
Rebecca from Maryland, USA of Bookish Beck
Kay from Washington State, USA of What? Me Read?
The first I read with the online group "literary Wives" that we re-named "The Marriage Plot" since not all the books we plan to read are about wives.
As in this case. The topic is adoption.
I was wondering about the title at first. But then I got it. You have families that are just a family on paper. Then you have family that are even not an official family but the people there belong together. And that is a family family. And I think that is a good description. You certainly know families who hardly get on, who don't see each other anymore once the children moved out, but even before, they don't relate to the others. That is not a family family, that's just a bunch of people who seem to live in the same house and (sometimes) carry the same name).
In this case we have a really weird family. A woman who gets two children without being married and gives them up for adoption, to two different kind of parents, a single mother and a gay married couple. But she also adopts two kids who have been abandoned by their mother. So, we have all sorts of relationships.
The woman is an actress and plays in a film about adoption. She claims that not all adoptions are sad and that the film is not a good one. That leads to a big scandal and her adopted kids try to get the whole family together.
I think this is a good book about showing a different side of adoption, one you don't read about that often. And I know families where it worked perfectly.
There are so many different kind of characters in this book, starting with the ten year old adopted daughter up to the grandmother. Every person is so different, as they should be. And they all have a point.
You can tell that the author has experienced this in her own family. A good quote by her (in the Seattle Times):
"Adoption is always offered as this last-resort, second-best thing that you have settled for, ... there are lots of ways to make good families and lots of ways to make crappy ones ... and they are not necessarily dictated by blood and genetics." So true.
From the back cover:
''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."
And here is the list of all our books.
