Immediate Family
A Novel
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A goop Book Club Selection and Best Book of the Year • Amazon Editors' Choice
“This unsparing and absorbing family portrait broke my heart and remade it a hundred times over.” —Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
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, and shared 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 a heartfelt letter addressed to Danny and an attempt at a full accounting of their years growing up, invoking everything from the classic 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.
In Immediate Family, a tender and fierce debut novel, Ashley Nelson Levy explores the enduring bond between two siblings and the complexities of motherhood, infertility, race, and the many definitions of family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman wrestles with her upbringing in a prolonged wedding toast in Levy's wrenching debut. Thai-born Danny Larsen, who was adopted by Americans, makes a last-minute request that his white sister, the unnamed narrator, fill in with a speech at his wedding after the best man backs out. In the speech, she rehashes her and Danny's tumultuous history, including their parents' five-year wait to adopt a child, beginning in 1989, before matching with three-year-old Danny, when the narrator was nine. Danny brings with him an obscured past and ferocious tantrums. As a teen, Danny begins charging expensive items to their parents' credit card without permission, which strains the family financially. The narrator also lays bare her struggles with infertility and describes her ambivalent feelings about adoption ("The fact that I could do this felt both convenient and questionable"). Powerful vignettes, such as memories of Danny being bullied as a child for looking different, blend with musings about the history of transracial adoption, Victorian literature, and famous adoptees. It's no small feat that Levy manages to hold all of these elements in the frame of the speech; the smooth flights may remind readers of Donald Antrim's novels. This exhibits a delicate touch while unpacking a complicated relationship, yielding much emotional insight.
