A tender and fierce debut novel that explores the bond between two siblings-one the biological child and one adopted-and the complexities of motherhood, infertility, race, and the many definitions of family.
It is the day of her brother's wedding and our narrator is still struggling with her toast. Despite a recent fracture between them, her brother, Danny, has asked her to give a speech and she doesn't know where to begin, how to put words to their kind of love. She was nine years old when she traveled with her parents to Thailand to meet her brother, six years her junior. They grew up together like any other siblings, sharing a bucolic childhood in Northern California. Yet when she holds their story up to the light, it refracts in ways she doesn't expect.
What follows is Immediate Family, a heartfelt letter addressed to Danny and an attempt at a full accounting of their years growing up, invoking everything from the Victorian adoption plot to childless women in literature to documents from Danny's case file. It's also a confession, of sorts, to the parts of her life that she has kept from him, including her own struggle with infertility. And, as the hours until the wedding wane, she uncovers the words that can't and won't be said aloud.
"This short, unsparing novel is a beautiful and provocative snapshot of a family and the complicated, imperfect love that binds one member of it to another."
goop
"Throughout Immediate Family, the narrator probes her identity as the older sister to a boy who confounds her, but also as the mother she longs to be. At the time of the wedding she has spent months undergoing fertility treatments, and her desire to reproduce . . . is both mirror and counterpoint to her parents' aching, yearslong quest to adopt Danny."
