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Immediate Family
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.
“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.
192 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 3, 2021
58 people are currently reading
2132 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews
September 17, 2021
The story seems so real and it felt like the author was telling me the story like it's a secret meant to be understood but not to be told as just a story.
This book reads like a memoir. It deals with family and the complexities that a family has.
Adoption plays a very important role in this story. A transracial adoption. The complexities it brought, how the adopted child struggles and how the adopting family changes.
The story also focuses on difficult pregnancies and infertility.
*I wish authors do not include spoilers for other books and best if passages from those books aren't included. Spoilers for The Catcher in the Rye, Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, Mansfield Park and a few more classics.
Even though they're classics which you might feel that everyone must have read them or known about them like the back of their hands, you're wrong there. I have yet to read Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield and the rest. I don't appreciate spoilers.
However, I can understand why these books were brought up. It meant to explain a theme on adoptive parents and what not they have to do or say to their adopted children.
A memorable read this one will remain. I find the characters and the writing quite engaging and convincing.
I feel the title and the cover quite apt considering the content.
I want to read more from the author.
This book reads like a memoir. It deals with family and the complexities that a family has.
Adoption plays a very important role in this story. A transracial adoption. The complexities it brought, how the adopted child struggles and how the adopting family changes.
The story also focuses on difficult pregnancies and infertility.
*I wish authors do not include spoilers for other books and best if passages from those books aren't included. Spoilers for The Catcher in the Rye, Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, Mansfield Park and a few more classics.
Even though they're classics which you might feel that everyone must have read them or known about them like the back of their hands, you're wrong there. I have yet to read Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield and the rest. I don't appreciate spoilers.
However, I can understand why these books were brought up. It meant to explain a theme on adoptive parents and what not they have to do or say to their adopted children.
A memorable read this one will remain. I find the characters and the writing quite engaging and convincing.
I feel the title and the cover quite apt considering the content.
I want to read more from the author.
June 19, 2024
I’d never heard of this book before I picked it up from the sale section of Waterstones, but I was immediately drawn to it because of the beautiful cover design. It sounded emotional and thought provoking and exactly my cup of tea. It was all of those things, and I really enjoyed my very short but sweet time with it. An unexpected hidden gem.
The writing took a minute to wrap my head around, because it’s told in second person and at times did feel a little detached. We;re told about Danny and his life from an outside perspective, and what I really think could have improved this book for me was hearing in Danny’s own words his story to be honest. I think a version of this book where the roles were reversed could’ve been a better way of framing the narration. Despite that, I do think it was still really touching and beautiful. In some ways, the tenderness of the writing in the beginning reminded me of Ocean Vuong and I thought it was stunning. The pacing had a very slow and steady rhythm to it, as Danny's life was pieced together before us.
This was a very character focused one, and we spent a lot of time dwelling on the past without ever really exploring how that past has shaped the present and who these characters are and how they interact in the present day. Their dynamics were quite strained and complex, and while to an extent it explores these, I found myself finishing the book with a lot of unanswered questions. The subject matter is really taxing emotionally to sit through, and this is a book that will weigh heavy on your heart and stay with you for a little while after you've read it. I think it opened my eyes to a different perspective, and it had me thinking about situations and feelings I’d never considered before so in that respect it was interesting.
I liked it overall and thought it was going to be a five star, but the ending felt really lacklustre. It kind of felt like it never really reached a conclusion, and ended quite abruptly with no real lasting final thoughts. For the build up of the novel, it felt to me like something climatic was going to happen during the final few moments but it never did. A build up to a fizzled out ending. Still worth a read though in my opinion despite that.
The writing took a minute to wrap my head around, because it’s told in second person and at times did feel a little detached. We;re told about Danny and his life from an outside perspective, and what I really think could have improved this book for me was hearing in Danny’s own words his story to be honest. I think a version of this book where the roles were reversed could’ve been a better way of framing the narration. Despite that, I do think it was still really touching and beautiful. In some ways, the tenderness of the writing in the beginning reminded me of Ocean Vuong and I thought it was stunning. The pacing had a very slow and steady rhythm to it, as Danny's life was pieced together before us.
This was a very character focused one, and we spent a lot of time dwelling on the past without ever really exploring how that past has shaped the present and who these characters are and how they interact in the present day. Their dynamics were quite strained and complex, and while to an extent it explores these, I found myself finishing the book with a lot of unanswered questions. The subject matter is really taxing emotionally to sit through, and this is a book that will weigh heavy on your heart and stay with you for a little while after you've read it. I think it opened my eyes to a different perspective, and it had me thinking about situations and feelings I’d never considered before so in that respect it was interesting.
I liked it overall and thought it was going to be a five star, but the ending felt really lacklustre. It kind of felt like it never really reached a conclusion, and ended quite abruptly with no real lasting final thoughts. For the build up of the novel, it felt to me like something climatic was going to happen during the final few moments but it never did. A build up to a fizzled out ending. Still worth a read though in my opinion despite that.
April 11, 2023
Ashley Nelson Levy’s Immediate Family made its way to bookstores in the UK shortly before I started working in one. Since then I have had the pleasure of seeing the way people interact with it on the shelves, of witnessing how its unique premise captures their attention, of engaging with the conversations that spring up around it before they decide to take a copy home.
I myself was wholly captivated by the book when I first came to it: I read most of it in a feverish daze on my way home from work, missing my stop on the bus because I was so immersed in the beauty and sincerity with which the narrator revisits her relationship with her adopted brother on the day of the latter’s wedding, and staying up late at night to absorb her delicately textured narrative of the complicated, imperfect, unending love between them. I finished reading in the wee hours of the night, enveloped in the narrative’s glowing intimacy, its honesty, its gentle exploration of the emotional dynamics within a transracially adoptive family and its unsparing examination of the charged politics surrounding it all. The next morning, I picked it back up and began all over again.
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Nelson Levy herself, and to learn more about the manner in which Immediate Family came about. We exchanged answers on a live, collaborative google document over the course of several months, and spoke about the motivations and intricacies behind this beautifully crafted debut novel about motherhood, infertility, race, and the many ways in which to talk about the love housed within our ideas of family. We also spoke about cultural narratives about female authorship and desire, especially in light of the US Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Our conversation has now been published as an interview by Lucy Writers Platform. You may read it, in full, by following this link.
I myself was wholly captivated by the book when I first came to it: I read most of it in a feverish daze on my way home from work, missing my stop on the bus because I was so immersed in the beauty and sincerity with which the narrator revisits her relationship with her adopted brother on the day of the latter’s wedding, and staying up late at night to absorb her delicately textured narrative of the complicated, imperfect, unending love between them. I finished reading in the wee hours of the night, enveloped in the narrative’s glowing intimacy, its honesty, its gentle exploration of the emotional dynamics within a transracially adoptive family and its unsparing examination of the charged politics surrounding it all. The next morning, I picked it back up and began all over again.
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Nelson Levy herself, and to learn more about the manner in which Immediate Family came about. We exchanged answers on a live, collaborative google document over the course of several months, and spoke about the motivations and intricacies behind this beautifully crafted debut novel about motherhood, infertility, race, and the many ways in which to talk about the love housed within our ideas of family. We also spoke about cultural narratives about female authorship and desire, especially in light of the US Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Our conversation has now been published as an interview by Lucy Writers Platform. You may read it, in full, by following this link.
September 5, 2021
Ashley Nelson Levy's
Immediate Family
is a thought-provoking story of family, memory, and the bond between siblings.
The younger brother of an unnamed narrator asks her to give a toast at his wedding. Close while they were growing up despite the six-year difference in age, a rift has come between them in recent years.
As the narrator tries to figure out what she wants to say in her speech she tells the story of their family. Her brother was adopted from Thailand when she was nine and he was three. She talks about traveling their with her parents to Thailand to get him, the stresses and worries they dealt with, and the struggles Danny faced growing up Asian in a white family.
Immediate Family is, in essence, a long letter from the narrator to her brother, chronicling their relationship as they grew older and the frictions their family experienced. But more than that, the letter details secrets she has kept, about the struggles she and her husband have experienced with fertility and the strains that is causing on their marriage.
This is an interesting and emotional story, but because it’s told in the second person, it often feels like you’re viewing it from a distance. There are some interesting narrative choices that the author makes—at times the narrator refers to her husband as “my husband” but at times, when she’s addressing her brother, she says “your brother-in-law.”
The author’s prose is spare and poetic, peppered with literary references and snippets from Danny’s adoption case file. All in all, it’s a unique read that shows how similar and how different each family’s struggles can be.
Check out my list of the best books I read in 2020 at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2020.html.
See all of my reviews at itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com.
Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/the.bookishworld.of.yrralh/.
The younger brother of an unnamed narrator asks her to give a toast at his wedding. Close while they were growing up despite the six-year difference in age, a rift has come between them in recent years.
As the narrator tries to figure out what she wants to say in her speech she tells the story of their family. Her brother was adopted from Thailand when she was nine and he was three. She talks about traveling their with her parents to Thailand to get him, the stresses and worries they dealt with, and the struggles Danny faced growing up Asian in a white family.
Immediate Family is, in essence, a long letter from the narrator to her brother, chronicling their relationship as they grew older and the frictions their family experienced. But more than that, the letter details secrets she has kept, about the struggles she and her husband have experienced with fertility and the strains that is causing on their marriage.
This is an interesting and emotional story, but because it’s told in the second person, it often feels like you’re viewing it from a distance. There are some interesting narrative choices that the author makes—at times the narrator refers to her husband as “my husband” but at times, when she’s addressing her brother, she says “your brother-in-law.”
The author’s prose is spare and poetic, peppered with literary references and snippets from Danny’s adoption case file. All in all, it’s a unique read that shows how similar and how different each family’s struggles can be.
Check out my list of the best books I read in 2020 at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2020.html.
See all of my reviews at itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com.
Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/the.bookishworld.of.yrralh/.
April 19, 2022
i was expecting and hoping for much more depth to this. i loved that this was like a letter and had the narrator talking to her brother, but with that i was also hoping for a range of emotions and for it to feel a bit more heartfelt and sensitive. the concept and writing was great but this really lacked feeling for me.
September 6, 2021
As this quiet novel – an extended address to the narrator’s brother, Danny, on his wedding day – unfolds, we learn more about this family’s dynamic. At a time when international/transracial adoption was rarer, her parents brought Danny home to California from Thailand to be her little brother. The narrator remembers the last-minute bureaucracy that preceded their flight, the conditions they discovered at the orphanage, Danny’s tantrums and speech therapy, a trip to Disneyland, their mother’s illness ... all the stories, good and bad, that make up a family’s repertoire. Alongside her reminiscences is her current struggle to conceive. She interrogates both basic plots – adoption as a trope in Victorian novels, and infertility narratives in the Bible – as she works her way towards the present day and the speech she has promised to give to fill in for Danny’s best man. Subtle as it is, the book is somehow lacking in emotional power.
October 29, 2021
"...a new kind of loneliness filled me, as our mother reached for your hand and we turned to talk away, to leave the grown boy and the room full of children behind. Five minutes earlier I might have asked 'what will become of him?' because I was a child who had grown up in the company of adults and thought I preferred honest answers. But in the middle of your room, I wondered about honest answers; here the truth seemed only complicated."
About a third of the way into this beautiful debut novel, I wondered why this book hadn't existed long before. Why, in a literary tradition filled with orphans and abandoned children, had I never encountered such an honest, loving, and at times painful portrayal of adoption before? This question also puzzles the novel's narrator, a woman in her 30s addressing her younger brother - adopted from Thailand as a toddler - who is about to get married.
The narrator, who like most of the characters remains unnamed, reflects on her family's story, racism, her brother's addiction to theft, faith, the orphans of Victorian novels, her own infertility, and most importantly, her fierce love for her brother. The novel manages in less than 200 pages to give a loving picture of a family living through the unique struggles and beauties of inter-racial, trans-continental adoption, while at the same time providing more general meditations on motherhood, familial anger, and filial love.
About a third of the way into this beautiful debut novel, I wondered why this book hadn't existed long before. Why, in a literary tradition filled with orphans and abandoned children, had I never encountered such an honest, loving, and at times painful portrayal of adoption before? This question also puzzles the novel's narrator, a woman in her 30s addressing her younger brother - adopted from Thailand as a toddler - who is about to get married.
The narrator, who like most of the characters remains unnamed, reflects on her family's story, racism, her brother's addiction to theft, faith, the orphans of Victorian novels, her own infertility, and most importantly, her fierce love for her brother. The novel manages in less than 200 pages to give a loving picture of a family living through the unique struggles and beauties of inter-racial, trans-continental adoption, while at the same time providing more general meditations on motherhood, familial anger, and filial love.
September 24, 2021
For those who read The Leavers, I think you will also appreciate this book. This book is written from the perspective of a woman whose family adopted a boy from Thailand when she was 9 years old. Her brothers wedding is coming up and he asks her to give a speech. The book is her speech to him, their story of growing up together as brother and sister and the challenges of an interracial adoption.
December 31, 2021
IMMEDIATE FAMILY by Ashley Nelson Levy is my last read of 2021 and unfortunately I didn’t care for it. It’s about a woman sharing her family’s story of adopting her brother. It was interesting to learn about the adoption process especially from the sisters point of view. But told mostly in second person directly to her brother it felt disconnected. A short quick book that I read in one day the momentum to the writing propelled me to read. I wanted to find out who these characters really were and if there was some plot. I felt it was lacking in emotions and the relationship building. I really didn’t like how throughout the book the narrator would refer to her husband as “my husband” but mostly as “your brother-in-law”.
Thank you to FSG Books via NetGalley for my advance review copy!
Thank you to FSG Books via NetGalley for my advance review copy!
October 12, 2021
Wonderful epistolary novel from an older sister to her younger adopted brother. She basically recounts his life from being born in Thailand to past his marriage. She is 9 years older. She is a brilliant student and he struggles to get by and turns to evangelical Christianity and perhaps drugs. He struggles in school and is diagnosed in 1st as having a speech and language disability, auditory processing disorder. The sister attributes his problems to neglect in the three years before he was adopted. What struck me personally about this book were several things. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1990s in Thailand. The author’s command of Thai and Thailand including names and places impressed me. She appears to have a knowledge of how it is pronounced too. The fact that the boy was screened for special education instead of ESOL is telling. Adoptive parents often fight having their adopted child identified as an English Language Learner and far more prefer Special Education and often fight to have that designation instead. It’s even was written into IDEA2000 due to lobbying of adoptive parents. It takes years to learn a language and a child can benefit from support in understanding, speaking, reading and writing it. It makes it harder when their first language is cut off. Special Education such as Speech and Language is for native speakers with problems, not kids learning English. The fact that boy had trouble in middle school isn’t surprising either. Many ESOL students who were cut off from long term ESOL support develop problems as their English language development support was cut off at an early age and the child never reached the 50% or average of native speakers in reading and writing. While the character is fiction, the common characteristics of an ESOL student being treated as if they had a disability is a reality many kids face and it’s not uncommon for adoptive parents to prefer thinking the problem is within the child, not the process they child has been put through. Adopting a foreign language child can be a very good thing for everyone but using the educational system to disable them is not. Thais don’t adopt kids very often. Even if they get a relative’s child to care for, very common, they feel no obligation to treat the child like their own. The US has a past of doing this also. Not uncommon in the world, probably based on economic development and educational.
December 5, 2021
There are many things to like about this novel. The attempt to detail the experience of adopting a child from an impoverished adoption home in a foreign country, the effect on the California middle class family, the detailing of relationship between the family daughter and her adopted brother, the struggle of the narrator to become pregnant.
What I found problematic were the chapters in the novel that were research about adoption procedures, adopted children throughout literature, lists of what the visiting home "inspector" looked for in the family home, and the science involved in achieving pregnancy for those women who are struggling to conceive. These were interspersed with the daily lives of the family when the narrator was about ten years old, as well as the family's relationships as they all grew older and the son, in particular, begins to act out his problematic life and identity
The novel is told in retrospect, but the switch between the world of the fiction and the world of the author researching (it never seemed believable to me that this was the narrator) was not smooth. The lack of names...only Danny is named. Both of these decisions distanced me from the novel. I began to feel that this was a doctoral dissertation that hadn't quite been woven into a novel that created a fictional world, one that I believed in. I applaud so much of the effort...but the end result felt to me like a patchwork of research, listing and story telling.
Well, I determined to complete the novel, rather than stop 2/3 through. The humor and turmoil in the family as they grow older and change caught me up eventually. I was rooting for all of them. I wish I knew their names. All but Danny are never named. Not sure what the author wanted to create by that choice...distance between the reader and the narrator of the story, her husband, the children's parents and the children? It felt too "studied" to me, too pretentiously symbolic. And yet...as I read further, every time the characters interact, I was caught up once again. It's kind of the way I used to feel as a kid riding bumper cars...I'm speeding along, totally engaged and then, crash, I'm stopped by another "literary" move. I'm pulled out of the story and jerked into paying attention to the author's sudden urge to remind me that she's doing something "different" and literarily important. No names, except for Danny. Too much information about the medical details of fertilization for a woman who struggles to conceive. I know you've done your research. I want to stay inside the wonderful story you are weaving. Not have so many advertisements about the work behind the scenes.
Well, here's an interview with the author that I found extremely informative. https://www.zyzzyva.org/2021/09/02/qa... and helpful in answering my concerns. It is a somewhat autobiographical novel...but not entirely. I do look forward to reading more of her work. I remember being asked to write a "multi-genre" piece of work for a master's writing class I took. Now, I'm seeing this piece as that, as not strictly a novel. The interview helps me understand Levy's choices more...and also appreciate the piece in a new way.
A few passages...SPOILERS:
"To make someone wait: The constant prerogative of all power"; Barth writes.
As she explores the family in terms of race, the narrator (author) talks about the dark adoptee as a misfit, a Heathcliff, "Is this not imperialist nostalgia at its best, Bell Hooks writes, "Potent expression of longing for the 'primitive?' One desires 'a bit of the Other to enhance the blank landscape of whiteness." I underlined the question because it troubled me.
Then she lists FIVE CARDINAL RULES FOR ADOPTIVE PARENTS:
NEVER THREATEN ABANDONMENT
ACKNOWLEDGE YOU CHILD'S FEELINGS.
ALLOW YOUR CHILD TO BE HIMSELF
DO NOT TRY TO TAKE THE PLACE OF THE BIRTH MOTHER
YOU CANNOT TAKE AWAY YOUR CHILD'S PAIN.
see what I mean about dissertation like interruptions to a narrative?
117 The narrator's mother has cancer, and can't deal with being read to... she'd just sit with a far away look. It banished all the awareness joy requires. It (chemo) seemed to sweep her soul out with the bas cells.
122 Narr. tries to convince her father not to pay her brother's debts.
126 I read somewhere that a baby remembers its mothers voice and face with 36 hrs. of birth. After only a few days in the world, he recognizes and prefers her native language even when its spoken by a stranger...But a newborn doesn't rec. his father's voice, signaling that these preferences are fomed in the symphony of the womb. The brain begins to decode and store her language patterns while he waits to meet her: her tone, her language, patterns, so that he can be born into the world with memories of her.
138 a poet says: As a Korean child growing up in a white family, in a white neighborhood, what I was aware of most was being conspicuous. Rarely did I go unnoticed. Unquestioned. But being visible is not the same as being seen.
142 143 more research about adoption
144, 45 relationship with husband
146 poignant moments with hus. and with a stranger 156-159 more research
167 Nar. brother asks what it's like to be married: I should have told you that the night before I got married, I clung to our father, the night I went off the pill, I clung to our mother, that all bright and ubiquitous changes n a life are always bound up in some kind of goodbye, some departure from one core unit to another.
*****171 nar. relates a disc. group about adoption in literature. It turned out no one cared about books. They told their own adoption stories. I felt as though the author's unconscious was letting her know how to revise this novel
What I found problematic were the chapters in the novel that were research about adoption procedures, adopted children throughout literature, lists of what the visiting home "inspector" looked for in the family home, and the science involved in achieving pregnancy for those women who are struggling to conceive. These were interspersed with the daily lives of the family when the narrator was about ten years old, as well as the family's relationships as they all grew older and the son, in particular, begins to act out his problematic life and identity
The novel is told in retrospect, but the switch between the world of the fiction and the world of the author researching (it never seemed believable to me that this was the narrator) was not smooth. The lack of names...only Danny is named. Both of these decisions distanced me from the novel. I began to feel that this was a doctoral dissertation that hadn't quite been woven into a novel that created a fictional world, one that I believed in. I applaud so much of the effort...but the end result felt to me like a patchwork of research, listing and story telling.
Well, I determined to complete the novel, rather than stop 2/3 through. The humor and turmoil in the family as they grow older and change caught me up eventually. I was rooting for all of them. I wish I knew their names. All but Danny are never named. Not sure what the author wanted to create by that choice...distance between the reader and the narrator of the story, her husband, the children's parents and the children? It felt too "studied" to me, too pretentiously symbolic. And yet...as I read further, every time the characters interact, I was caught up once again. It's kind of the way I used to feel as a kid riding bumper cars...I'm speeding along, totally engaged and then, crash, I'm stopped by another "literary" move. I'm pulled out of the story and jerked into paying attention to the author's sudden urge to remind me that she's doing something "different" and literarily important. No names, except for Danny. Too much information about the medical details of fertilization for a woman who struggles to conceive. I know you've done your research. I want to stay inside the wonderful story you are weaving. Not have so many advertisements about the work behind the scenes.
Well, here's an interview with the author that I found extremely informative. https://www.zyzzyva.org/2021/09/02/qa... and helpful in answering my concerns. It is a somewhat autobiographical novel...but not entirely. I do look forward to reading more of her work. I remember being asked to write a "multi-genre" piece of work for a master's writing class I took. Now, I'm seeing this piece as that, as not strictly a novel. The interview helps me understand Levy's choices more...and also appreciate the piece in a new way.
A few passages...SPOILERS:
"To make someone wait: The constant prerogative of all power"; Barth writes.
As she explores the family in terms of race, the narrator (author) talks about the dark adoptee as a misfit, a Heathcliff, "Is this not imperialist nostalgia at its best, Bell Hooks writes, "Potent expression of longing for the 'primitive?' One desires 'a bit of the Other to enhance the blank landscape of whiteness." I underlined the question because it troubled me.
Then she lists FIVE CARDINAL RULES FOR ADOPTIVE PARENTS:
NEVER THREATEN ABANDONMENT
ACKNOWLEDGE YOU CHILD'S FEELINGS.
ALLOW YOUR CHILD TO BE HIMSELF
DO NOT TRY TO TAKE THE PLACE OF THE BIRTH MOTHER
YOU CANNOT TAKE AWAY YOUR CHILD'S PAIN.
see what I mean about dissertation like interruptions to a narrative?
117 The narrator's mother has cancer, and can't deal with being read to... she'd just sit with a far away look. It banished all the awareness joy requires. It (chemo) seemed to sweep her soul out with the bas cells.
122 Narr. tries to convince her father not to pay her brother's debts.
126 I read somewhere that a baby remembers its mothers voice and face with 36 hrs. of birth. After only a few days in the world, he recognizes and prefers her native language even when its spoken by a stranger...But a newborn doesn't rec. his father's voice, signaling that these preferences are fomed in the symphony of the womb. The brain begins to decode and store her language patterns while he waits to meet her: her tone, her language, patterns, so that he can be born into the world with memories of her.
138 a poet says: As a Korean child growing up in a white family, in a white neighborhood, what I was aware of most was being conspicuous. Rarely did I go unnoticed. Unquestioned. But being visible is not the same as being seen.
142 143 more research about adoption
144, 45 relationship with husband
146 poignant moments with hus. and with a stranger 156-159 more research
167 Nar. brother asks what it's like to be married: I should have told you that the night before I got married, I clung to our father, the night I went off the pill, I clung to our mother, that all bright and ubiquitous changes n a life are always bound up in some kind of goodbye, some departure from one core unit to another.
*****171 nar. relates a disc. group about adoption in literature. It turned out no one cared about books. They told their own adoption stories. I felt as though the author's unconscious was letting her know how to revise this novel
August 1, 2025
Such a complex and beautiful book, and such an unusual perspective on adoption: the ‘biological’ child talking to the adopted one. Many sentences made me stop to read them again ‘I used to imagine your birth mother looking down on me every time I was tough on you. It scared me to consider what she might be thinking”. Because I never thought of it before, hroughout the book it felt like I knew nothing about adoption, and that every opinion I thought I had about adoption all vanished without any clear picture appearing in the end. It all seemed so complicated, intertwined, fluid: motherhood, family, taking care of each other when adults… a very important book to question/understand/unmake kinship
January 5, 2022
Exquisitely written and incredibly powerful
Read
August 7, 2022This book made me feel emotions and I liked that. It is labeled a novel but reads like a memoir and would have been better being one or the other.
January 19, 2022
YOU REMEMBER HOW I was in my teens and twenties: I took pride in saying I didn’t want marriage or kids. We lived in a place where children grew up and stayed, multiplying to keep the Catholic school running, and I longed to escape a cycle. It never required much of a leap, that certainty that a disinterest in marriage and children made me not only different but better, like the sexy aunt in the movies who comes to shake up the family on a weekend visit. That kind of woman always seemed to have lacy underwear, a bottle in her purse, a wrecked beauty that, back then, I found enviable.
I used to think that a fertility clinic would be the kind of place where women cried while they waited on the couches for their names to be called. But most of us waited for our names just as we wait for the bus. Once a man came in with his girlfriend and looked at us waiting-room women as if we were contagious, as if he were going to start his period on the way home. This may be the reason I always preferred to come alone. I liked the feeling that we were all banded together against something while we waited, even in our silence. To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, Barthes writes.
Only lately have I thought about who I became in all those free hours of childhood, building up a quiet little island from books, population one, a place where you could never reach me. Our mother began reading to me early on and language became the bridge between us.
In the seventies, the National Association of Black Social Workers changed the course of the conversation when it issued a statement on transracial adoption, which took a “vehement stand against the placement of Black children in white homes for any reason.” It argued that white homes weren’t equipped to raise a Black child in a racist society, that these adoptions were done for the benefit of the white family rather than the welfare of the child, and that Black families would adopt in higher numbers if the adoption process didn’t effectively eliminate their applications. The statement echoed throughout the community and Black–white placements began to decline.
AS OUR DEPARTURE NEARED, our mother cooked her way through the Thai recipe book she’d found at a garage sale. I have no memory of what she learned, only that she tried, and that the staples in our home were none of those things after you came. What we loved: Hershey’s Syrup, Chef Boyardee, Bagel Bites with the little pepperonis. Kraft Mac and Cheese and Froot Loops.
And what does our twenty-two-year-old father sound like? The year was 1967. He arrived in Da Nang on a 120-degree day in July, and the letters continue until Thanksgiving of the same year, when an explosion sent him into the air and then into the hospital. He describes the eighty men put under his care, the heat, the food, the mosquitoes, the children from the villages who came by to sell Popsicles to the platoon. His handwriting is the same, and a joke here and there, but that’s about it. He is a young, handsome stranger on paper, with a calm that can perhaps be attributed to being twenty-two. The omission of the violence backstage only seemed to make it more ominous, and I was embarrassed to realize that in reading I felt the same as I’d felt in life: disappointed because the stories had been stripped of the details. His greatest concern is keeping his men safe, a group of men who are younger than our twenty-two-year-old father. In the back of the folder is a sandwich bag that holds his Purple Heart, and a note from a woman in Potlatch, Idaho, thanking our father for letting her know how her fiancé died, what a relief it had been that he went honorably and without pain. As I read I couldn’t let go of the feeling that I was somehow still missing half of the stack. Though what had I really expected to find? I read and reread them for days afterward, then weeks, as if by extracting, turning over, and polishing each story, it would reveal some deeper message. Have to go, to the rescue—he signs off. Maybe they also made me wonder about the narratives we inherit, about what does or doesn’t get passed on. Without a child of my own, I didn’t know what would happen to my stories, my letters, my sentimental items and junk. Would you want any of it? I offered our father’s letters to you once if you remember, and you said, Do they talk about the war, and I said, Kind of, and then you never asked about them again. If you had read them, you might see a trace of the same man who, thirty years later, would call the senator’s office, who would wait in countless lines and fight the ones in which he couldn’t afford to wait. Or perhaps I can only read with the knowledge of the man and the father he would become.
But the locker room often surprised me. How many different bodies I saw, how many types of people. Here was this space just feet from the ordinary world and suddenly women were baring breasts and baring feelings and walking around with no makeup or apologies; those few feet at the entrance were where all the rules changed. There were the showboats who stood in front of the mirror naked, bending over to blow dry the backside of their head; there were the corner-dwellers who turned away while they changed, as if punished, choreographing an impressive routine with their towel. There were tattoos and birthmarks and burn marks; there were long purple scars and small bedpost notches; there were barbelled nipples and hair, hair, hair. There were those who came in and out without a word, and those who talked loudly with their girlfriends while they dressed, passing stories of illness, of men, of money, of bodies.
So I went back to the library, back to some of the Victorians I loved, the books, you’d say, that you’d use as levelers for your table, and noticed the adoption plot shake out in two ways: (1) the adoptee repairs the state of the family, one broken by the biological children or lack thereof, e.g., the little blond angel who shows up on the doorstep of the town misanthrope in Silas Marner, or (2) the adoptee brings chaos and disaster to everyone around them, e.g., Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
WHAT I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE to describe to you or anyone else is how I meant those words growing up, He’s just my brother, that you were my blood, my coconspirator, my nuisance, my baby. That you weren’t different, some alien, a stranger or freak. I never wanted to talk about otherness because you weren’t other to me growing up, you were just my brother, but now I see how one-sided that is. You were different, after all, in our house, in our school, in our town. I should have figured out ways to talk to you about how you were navigating that difference, a white family, a white life. I should have recognized my own discomfort, misunderstood for love or protection or sparing your feelings. Because how can silence ever be the better, more loving alternative?
When we came home from that trip, language truly began to find you, and you reported back that french fries were now your favorite food; you confessed your unabashed love for the large male mouse. Either in solidarity or heartsickness you watched a Disneyland musical on loop, songs that haunted me in deep dreams. When people asked where you were from, you now happily provided them with an answer. Disneyland, you said.
WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE MARRIED, you’d asked me. To be married is to know the way he sits in his chair when he’s concentrating. His back hunches and his feet tuck under, as if his whole body is tightening to keep grasp on an idea. The sounds he makes in his sleep, how he’ll order off a menu, that he’d choke and die before sending anything back. I’d say that to be married is to make peace with all you cannot see, as hard as you try. For instance, the gray space of his life before me, before our life in California, growing up on the other side of the country, raised in a city apartment with one brother and one sister. When we began dating and I asked him to tell me stories about his childhood, about three children on top of one another in a city apartment, he’d say that he didn’t really remember. At first I didn’t believe this, attributing the lack of detail to something unhappy, but soon I realized he was telling the truth. The few memories he keeps are often told out of order, his features strained, like a person who’s been tasked with describing the qualities of the air, or the taste of water. Sometimes I find myself correcting him based on some earlier version I’ve heard from his mother or sister. That’s probably it, he’ll say, nodding. He doesn’t seem obligated to the past, and this is what keeps him mostly mysterious to me, as if he could have been anyone before, as if anything could have happened, as if the old stories could still change, and he might recount them one day when we are old, with a shrug. His days as a pirate or a pimp, a king. I don’t know if mystery is the thing that holds people in love, though, or the way one sits in a chair. I don’t know if it’s the absence of familiar pain in a person, or the recognition of one. To be married is to live with both things at once, the knowing and the mystery. One evening not too long ago, I had a heart monitor strapped to my chest, as prescribed by the doctor. I wasn’t allowed to shower but was embarrassed to go into work in the morning with the slick sheen of my hair. Your brother-in-law put a towel on the floor, filled up our pitcher, made sure the water wasn’t too hot or too cold. At thirty-something years old we leaned back against the floor as he washed my hair in the tub, the heart monitor protected under a sweatshirt. He leaned over with a look so concentrated I began laughing, a girlish laugh, because I’d known him and lived with him for years and never once had we crossed into this territory, stretching tremulously into the future, picturing ourselves old and sick, before hurrying back into our young bodies. And again I realized I had been crazy to think that marriage was not for me. He leaned over to pat my hair dry and I thought, thank God sometimes we are wrong about things.
Then it’s my turn to stand up and speak. I DO NOT SAY: Not so long ago, a little boy was born in a faraway country. His name was Boon-Nam and this baby was you. The woman who gave birth to you knew that she could not give you all the things you needed, and so you came to us. Or rather, we came to you. I do not say that many years later you told us you were ready to return to that faraway country. We said we’d join you but you wanted to do it on your own. We felt the kind of puncture in our heart and shins akin to growing pains, except by then you were already grown. So we helped you plan the trip and sent you on your way. It seemed like the story should end there and, very briefly, it did. I do not say that broken hearts are so wearisome to carry around, because I don’t have to tell you that. I understand why you’re quick to put it all behind you, to do your best to forget once the anger subsides. I do not say that everyone carries their own narrative of the world in their head. We’re made most human by these visions, in how limited or expansive a life’s story can become, the conviction with which we believe things should or might or did happen, and in all the ways we get it wrong. I had visions of your return to the Babies’ Home; I saw you walking the halls, eyeing the beds and the floors and the children with the same kind of scrutiny and care as we once had, the images branded there mostly forever. I could see you so clearly as you drifted down the canal on that boat. But you never made it to any of the places traced in my dreams, close as you were, and I realize now that maybe you never will. I do not say that it’s an impossible task, trying to fit you on a page. To describe how much I love you, how my love for you works. Like a tantrum or a firework, a dizzying ride in a teacup. Like an old, intimate joke that through the decades keeps its punch line, though nobody can remember how it started. I do not say that I still can’t answer how our story should be kept or told, how it falls in or out with history’s long catalog of wounds and tropes. I have only come to this: meeting you that day all those years ago became the axis on which everything else has spun.
I used to think that a fertility clinic would be the kind of place where women cried while they waited on the couches for their names to be called. But most of us waited for our names just as we wait for the bus. Once a man came in with his girlfriend and looked at us waiting-room women as if we were contagious, as if he were going to start his period on the way home. This may be the reason I always preferred to come alone. I liked the feeling that we were all banded together against something while we waited, even in our silence. To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, Barthes writes.
Only lately have I thought about who I became in all those free hours of childhood, building up a quiet little island from books, population one, a place where you could never reach me. Our mother began reading to me early on and language became the bridge between us.
In the seventies, the National Association of Black Social Workers changed the course of the conversation when it issued a statement on transracial adoption, which took a “vehement stand against the placement of Black children in white homes for any reason.” It argued that white homes weren’t equipped to raise a Black child in a racist society, that these adoptions were done for the benefit of the white family rather than the welfare of the child, and that Black families would adopt in higher numbers if the adoption process didn’t effectively eliminate their applications. The statement echoed throughout the community and Black–white placements began to decline.
AS OUR DEPARTURE NEARED, our mother cooked her way through the Thai recipe book she’d found at a garage sale. I have no memory of what she learned, only that she tried, and that the staples in our home were none of those things after you came. What we loved: Hershey’s Syrup, Chef Boyardee, Bagel Bites with the little pepperonis. Kraft Mac and Cheese and Froot Loops.
And what does our twenty-two-year-old father sound like? The year was 1967. He arrived in Da Nang on a 120-degree day in July, and the letters continue until Thanksgiving of the same year, when an explosion sent him into the air and then into the hospital. He describes the eighty men put under his care, the heat, the food, the mosquitoes, the children from the villages who came by to sell Popsicles to the platoon. His handwriting is the same, and a joke here and there, but that’s about it. He is a young, handsome stranger on paper, with a calm that can perhaps be attributed to being twenty-two. The omission of the violence backstage only seemed to make it more ominous, and I was embarrassed to realize that in reading I felt the same as I’d felt in life: disappointed because the stories had been stripped of the details. His greatest concern is keeping his men safe, a group of men who are younger than our twenty-two-year-old father. In the back of the folder is a sandwich bag that holds his Purple Heart, and a note from a woman in Potlatch, Idaho, thanking our father for letting her know how her fiancé died, what a relief it had been that he went honorably and without pain. As I read I couldn’t let go of the feeling that I was somehow still missing half of the stack. Though what had I really expected to find? I read and reread them for days afterward, then weeks, as if by extracting, turning over, and polishing each story, it would reveal some deeper message. Have to go, to the rescue—he signs off. Maybe they also made me wonder about the narratives we inherit, about what does or doesn’t get passed on. Without a child of my own, I didn’t know what would happen to my stories, my letters, my sentimental items and junk. Would you want any of it? I offered our father’s letters to you once if you remember, and you said, Do they talk about the war, and I said, Kind of, and then you never asked about them again. If you had read them, you might see a trace of the same man who, thirty years later, would call the senator’s office, who would wait in countless lines and fight the ones in which he couldn’t afford to wait. Or perhaps I can only read with the knowledge of the man and the father he would become.
But the locker room often surprised me. How many different bodies I saw, how many types of people. Here was this space just feet from the ordinary world and suddenly women were baring breasts and baring feelings and walking around with no makeup or apologies; those few feet at the entrance were where all the rules changed. There were the showboats who stood in front of the mirror naked, bending over to blow dry the backside of their head; there were the corner-dwellers who turned away while they changed, as if punished, choreographing an impressive routine with their towel. There were tattoos and birthmarks and burn marks; there were long purple scars and small bedpost notches; there were barbelled nipples and hair, hair, hair. There were those who came in and out without a word, and those who talked loudly with their girlfriends while they dressed, passing stories of illness, of men, of money, of bodies.
So I went back to the library, back to some of the Victorians I loved, the books, you’d say, that you’d use as levelers for your table, and noticed the adoption plot shake out in two ways: (1) the adoptee repairs the state of the family, one broken by the biological children or lack thereof, e.g., the little blond angel who shows up on the doorstep of the town misanthrope in Silas Marner, or (2) the adoptee brings chaos and disaster to everyone around them, e.g., Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
WHAT I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE to describe to you or anyone else is how I meant those words growing up, He’s just my brother, that you were my blood, my coconspirator, my nuisance, my baby. That you weren’t different, some alien, a stranger or freak. I never wanted to talk about otherness because you weren’t other to me growing up, you were just my brother, but now I see how one-sided that is. You were different, after all, in our house, in our school, in our town. I should have figured out ways to talk to you about how you were navigating that difference, a white family, a white life. I should have recognized my own discomfort, misunderstood for love or protection or sparing your feelings. Because how can silence ever be the better, more loving alternative?
When we came home from that trip, language truly began to find you, and you reported back that french fries were now your favorite food; you confessed your unabashed love for the large male mouse. Either in solidarity or heartsickness you watched a Disneyland musical on loop, songs that haunted me in deep dreams. When people asked where you were from, you now happily provided them with an answer. Disneyland, you said.
WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE MARRIED, you’d asked me. To be married is to know the way he sits in his chair when he’s concentrating. His back hunches and his feet tuck under, as if his whole body is tightening to keep grasp on an idea. The sounds he makes in his sleep, how he’ll order off a menu, that he’d choke and die before sending anything back. I’d say that to be married is to make peace with all you cannot see, as hard as you try. For instance, the gray space of his life before me, before our life in California, growing up on the other side of the country, raised in a city apartment with one brother and one sister. When we began dating and I asked him to tell me stories about his childhood, about three children on top of one another in a city apartment, he’d say that he didn’t really remember. At first I didn’t believe this, attributing the lack of detail to something unhappy, but soon I realized he was telling the truth. The few memories he keeps are often told out of order, his features strained, like a person who’s been tasked with describing the qualities of the air, or the taste of water. Sometimes I find myself correcting him based on some earlier version I’ve heard from his mother or sister. That’s probably it, he’ll say, nodding. He doesn’t seem obligated to the past, and this is what keeps him mostly mysterious to me, as if he could have been anyone before, as if anything could have happened, as if the old stories could still change, and he might recount them one day when we are old, with a shrug. His days as a pirate or a pimp, a king. I don’t know if mystery is the thing that holds people in love, though, or the way one sits in a chair. I don’t know if it’s the absence of familiar pain in a person, or the recognition of one. To be married is to live with both things at once, the knowing and the mystery. One evening not too long ago, I had a heart monitor strapped to my chest, as prescribed by the doctor. I wasn’t allowed to shower but was embarrassed to go into work in the morning with the slick sheen of my hair. Your brother-in-law put a towel on the floor, filled up our pitcher, made sure the water wasn’t too hot or too cold. At thirty-something years old we leaned back against the floor as he washed my hair in the tub, the heart monitor protected under a sweatshirt. He leaned over with a look so concentrated I began laughing, a girlish laugh, because I’d known him and lived with him for years and never once had we crossed into this territory, stretching tremulously into the future, picturing ourselves old and sick, before hurrying back into our young bodies. And again I realized I had been crazy to think that marriage was not for me. He leaned over to pat my hair dry and I thought, thank God sometimes we are wrong about things.
Then it’s my turn to stand up and speak. I DO NOT SAY: Not so long ago, a little boy was born in a faraway country. His name was Boon-Nam and this baby was you. The woman who gave birth to you knew that she could not give you all the things you needed, and so you came to us. Or rather, we came to you. I do not say that many years later you told us you were ready to return to that faraway country. We said we’d join you but you wanted to do it on your own. We felt the kind of puncture in our heart and shins akin to growing pains, except by then you were already grown. So we helped you plan the trip and sent you on your way. It seemed like the story should end there and, very briefly, it did. I do not say that broken hearts are so wearisome to carry around, because I don’t have to tell you that. I understand why you’re quick to put it all behind you, to do your best to forget once the anger subsides. I do not say that everyone carries their own narrative of the world in their head. We’re made most human by these visions, in how limited or expansive a life’s story can become, the conviction with which we believe things should or might or did happen, and in all the ways we get it wrong. I had visions of your return to the Babies’ Home; I saw you walking the halls, eyeing the beds and the floors and the children with the same kind of scrutiny and care as we once had, the images branded there mostly forever. I could see you so clearly as you drifted down the canal on that boat. But you never made it to any of the places traced in my dreams, close as you were, and I realize now that maybe you never will. I do not say that it’s an impossible task, trying to fit you on a page. To describe how much I love you, how my love for you works. Like a tantrum or a firework, a dizzying ride in a teacup. Like an old, intimate joke that through the decades keeps its punch line, though nobody can remember how it started. I do not say that I still can’t answer how our story should be kept or told, how it falls in or out with history’s long catalog of wounds and tropes. I have only come to this: meeting you that day all those years ago became the axis on which everything else has spun.
July 28, 2024
i don’t remember the last time i cried so much reading a book 😵💫
June 22, 2024
Raw and very well written. The story lacked a substantial plot but it was one of those books that just makes you think and feel a lot.
August 1, 2021
Completely spectacular. Thankful to Ashley Nelson Levy for this honest take on adoption and infertility.
February 3, 2021
I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.
This is a story about adoption and infertility, with the narrator (who is struggling to get pregnant) addressing her adopted brother and talking about the things she might say about him in her speech at his wedding. It is therefore in the second person throughout, which I dislike and which felt contrived in places - the constant references to 'your brother in law' grated every time. There were paragraphs with researched information about adoption or infertility which read as if they had been dropped in so that the reader would understand things better, but which read oddly in the context of the narrator talking to her brother.
The parents were very saintly, although perhaps naive - Danny would only have abused my credit card the one time. This was a thoughtful book, and I can see that other readers might score it more highly, but for me it was a three star read: it dragged a bit by the end and the constant shifting in timeline which now seems compulsory in all new novels didn't help.
This is a story about adoption and infertility, with the narrator (who is struggling to get pregnant) addressing her adopted brother and talking about the things she might say about him in her speech at his wedding. It is therefore in the second person throughout, which I dislike and which felt contrived in places - the constant references to 'your brother in law' grated every time. There were paragraphs with researched information about adoption or infertility which read as if they had been dropped in so that the reader would understand things better, but which read oddly in the context of the narrator talking to her brother.
The parents were very saintly, although perhaps naive - Danny would only have abused my credit card the one time. This was a thoughtful book, and I can see that other readers might score it more highly, but for me it was a three star read: it dragged a bit by the end and the constant shifting in timeline which now seems compulsory in all new novels didn't help.
September 8, 2021
2.5ish. I really liked the premise and think part of the meh feeling might just be related to timing, but I had a hard time absorbing the universal truths of the situation (international adoption from the adoptee/adopter perspective) that were likely quite profound and poetic with the specific character strife that made both the unnamed narrator and Danny rather unlikeable and with poor communication skills. I feel like this storyline didn't need the extra personal secrets/drama and they instead detracted from the general difficulty of assimilation by nurture.
August 10, 2023
Thank you @NetGalley & @fsg for my eARC copy in exchange for an honest review (sorry for the massive delay I got really behind on my reading).
[TW/CW at the end]
I’ve tried to collect my thoughts (there were many) as I was reading this book. I probably loved this the most, for being a work of fiction, how much it made me think about my own life.
Started this one thinking it would just be an interesting read about siblings’ relationships (I’m an only child so I obviously have no first-hard experience of that), but it somehow hit me in unexpected ways, specifically on the topic of choosing or not to have children, what that means in the concept of “family”.
On this topic, this quote hit me particularly hard: “Maybe my childlessness had also bound me to our parents; my only concept of family was a nostalgic one. Some days I don%E2%80%99t know what frightens me more, the idea of life without children, or without parents”
I found myself nodding as I was reading certain lines about not wanting/wanting children and all the messy feelings that come with those thoughts. I think the struggle was portrayed beautifully.
I’ve frequently (obviously) read books that included siblings’ relationships, but this was different. It offered a different look at what a siblings’ relationship is made of. An intimate look at siblings’ relationships, what makes them love each other and what the foundations of that relationship is.
Ashley Nelson Levy has such a way with words, I found myself underlying passages multiple times, something I never do for works of fiction and usually exclusively relegate to non fiction pieces. This book was full of poignant quotes, that I just knew I’d love to go back to, so I underlined and highlighted all the way through.
I also particularly enjoyed the discourse in language and language barriers that was scattered throughout this story, not the main theme for sure but something I personally really enjoy.
cw: infertility, mentions of bullying, racism, anti-Asian racism, racial slurs, mentions of cancer, addiction (gambling/money)
[TW/CW at the end]
I’ve tried to collect my thoughts (there were many) as I was reading this book. I probably loved this the most, for being a work of fiction, how much it made me think about my own life.
Started this one thinking it would just be an interesting read about siblings’ relationships (I’m an only child so I obviously have no first-hard experience of that), but it somehow hit me in unexpected ways, specifically on the topic of choosing or not to have children, what that means in the concept of “family”.
On this topic, this quote hit me particularly hard: “Maybe my childlessness had also bound me to our parents; my only concept of family was a nostalgic one. Some days I don%E2%80%99t know what frightens me more, the idea of life without children, or without parents”
I found myself nodding as I was reading certain lines about not wanting/wanting children and all the messy feelings that come with those thoughts. I think the struggle was portrayed beautifully.
I’ve frequently (obviously) read books that included siblings’ relationships, but this was different. It offered a different look at what a siblings’ relationship is made of. An intimate look at siblings’ relationships, what makes them love each other and what the foundations of that relationship is.
Ashley Nelson Levy has such a way with words, I found myself underlying passages multiple times, something I never do for works of fiction and usually exclusively relegate to non fiction pieces. This book was full of poignant quotes, that I just knew I’d love to go back to, so I underlined and highlighted all the way through.
I also particularly enjoyed the discourse in language and language barriers that was scattered throughout this story, not the main theme for sure but something I personally really enjoy.
cw: infertility, mentions of bullying, racism, anti-Asian racism, racial slurs, mentions of cancer, addiction (gambling/money)
August 29, 2022
I found this slim volume using Librarything.com. I put in two of my fave books, Cloud Cuckoo Land and Groundskeeping, and this book came up as a recommendation on both so I had to check it out. I’m so glad I did. Although a slim volume, weighing in at 178 pages, it contains multitudes.
Our narrator addresses the entire book to “you” and we soon find out “you” is her adopted brother. The book is about her relationship with him and wow is it a tough relationship. I adored reading about this because I am adopted and had a somewhat difficult (but now beautiful) relationship with my brother so it gave me a lot to think about and there were many similarities.
The narrator also speaks at length about infertility which resonated less with me but was equally fascinating especially as it relates to adoption. Because of her difficult relationship with her adopted brother (our narrator was not adopted), she really didn’t consider adoption as an option and has very complicated emotions in response.
There is a sort of mystery in the book which is set at the beginning when the narrator makes references to the horrible things the brother did and we find out what they are as the novel unfolds, but mostly toward the end. I liked the mystery aspect but felt depressed and terrible when we found out what he did. The narrator is so understanding, much more than I would have been, and that raised questions within myself about whether or not I’m a tolerant and empathetic person.
Overall I absolutely loved this book which seemed to have its roots in real life for this author although that is purely speculation. Perhaps some research is needed today on my part? Highly recommend.
Our narrator addresses the entire book to “you” and we soon find out “you” is her adopted brother. The book is about her relationship with him and wow is it a tough relationship. I adored reading about this because I am adopted and had a somewhat difficult (but now beautiful) relationship with my brother so it gave me a lot to think about and there were many similarities.
The narrator also speaks at length about infertility which resonated less with me but was equally fascinating especially as it relates to adoption. Because of her difficult relationship with her adopted brother (our narrator was not adopted), she really didn’t consider adoption as an option and has very complicated emotions in response.
There is a sort of mystery in the book which is set at the beginning when the narrator makes references to the horrible things the brother did and we find out what they are as the novel unfolds, but mostly toward the end. I liked the mystery aspect but felt depressed and terrible when we found out what he did. The narrator is so understanding, much more than I would have been, and that raised questions within myself about whether or not I’m a tolerant and empathetic person.
Overall I absolutely loved this book which seemed to have its roots in real life for this author although that is purely speculation. Perhaps some research is needed today on my part? Highly recommend.
December 18, 2024
I can hardly believe this is Levy's first book. I read it in one sitting, mostly by the kitchen window, where I could hear the rain falling outside, then at the dining table, as my family chatted and my dad tried in vain to engage me in conversations about potential cures for diabetes and the importance of investing in stocks. (I had zero interest in potential cures for diabetes and the importance of investing in stocks, and only half-heard my brother's complaints about Current Politics, though I did hear my sister mention something about koalas, and my mother talk warmly about her student's incredible creative writing pieces, which he'd written all in Mandarin.)
This book was beautiful. The prose was fluid, natural, elegant, intimate..... it left quite an impression. This is the kind of book that you need to hold for a while, like a lozenge in your mouth, like a warm stone in your hand. Highly recommend. I wouldn't have found it if it weren't for the time my sister and I perused the shelves of the closest library hungrily, snatching up every possible fictional door like children at a candy shop, and trundling over to the checkout station with huge stacks of books in our paws, looking rather shame-faced and proud at the same time.
This book was beautiful. The prose was fluid, natural, elegant, intimate..... it left quite an impression. This is the kind of book that you need to hold for a while, like a lozenge in your mouth, like a warm stone in your hand. Highly recommend. I wouldn't have found it if it weren't for the time my sister and I perused the shelves of the closest library hungrily, snatching up every possible fictional door like children at a candy shop, and trundling over to the checkout station with huge stacks of books in our paws, looking rather shame-faced and proud at the same time.
February 1, 2021
Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the early ebook. This is a smart and really heartfelt first novel. At the start, our narrator is asked by her brother to speak at his upcoming wedding as his best man refuses to do so. As she’s preparing what to say a lifetime of memories come flooding back to her, starting with the drawn out, years long adoption process and then the trip to Thailand when she’s nine to adopt her brother, who is then three. The brother is renamed Danny and the family starts their life in a small town in California, close to San Francisco. The book recounts Danny’s rough adjustment to his new life, the bullying at school, but also the many beautiful memories that she has of growing up with Danny and the family as a whole. As she’s dealing with this wedding speech she also describes the last few years of trying to get pregnant and start her own family with her husband, but all the fertility drugs and procedures don’t seem to be working. This is such a thoughtful book that has a very lived in truth on every page.
March 16, 2025
A tender retelling of her adopted brother's upbringing, written in addressed letter form. On the way, she also tells her own story about her struggle to have biological kids, and the story of her brother meeting his wife, which results in later asking her to give the best man speech.
It was good at covering the realities of transracial adoptions, a little bit patronizing or cliché at times in the writing, but still sweet at describing bonds between all members of the family members, the waiting for the adoption, the ups and downs of her relationship with her brother as they grew up. Could have been a little bit shorter and it could have explored her brother's relationship with his fiancé a little bit further, considering that the inspiration to write the book came from having to give the speech at their wedding.
It was good at covering the realities of transracial adoptions, a little bit patronizing or cliché at times in the writing, but still sweet at describing bonds between all members of the family members, the waiting for the adoption, the ups and downs of her relationship with her brother as they grew up. Could have been a little bit shorter and it could have explored her brother's relationship with his fiancé a little bit further, considering that the inspiration to write the book came from having to give the speech at their wedding.
May 27, 2022
Levy's book is extremely interesting from the point of view of craft. The book is written in the second person. Her adopted brother's request that she speak at his forthcoming wedding causes her to consider the bumpy road of their relationship, the fallout of her parents having years earlier decided to adopt a three-year-old child from the Far East, and her own frustration at being unable to bring her own child to the world. The author switches to the third person in order to fill in the back story, weaving it seamlessly into the unfurling of the main narrative. The story is more times painful than light but manages to convey a definite hope to individuals so very desperate to love and be loved; to parent and be parented. This is a special read.
August 15, 2023
Maybe I’m being a bit generous with my review, but this was a powerful book! I’m biased because the topic of adoption is close to me. This book brings up important themes around the topic of adoption, particularly transracial adoptions, and really challenges the ignorance the world can often have towards adoption— simply seeing it as this beautiful, life-changing thing for the adoptee, without realizing the complex journey, and oftentimes painful experiences, that are impactful for the adoptee and the adoptee’s family. The book is from the perspective of the sibling, I appreciated how “short” the book was, and is centered upon the pinnacle moment of the narrator having to think of a speech to give at a wedding.
October 19, 2025
Ashley Nelson Levy’s “Immediate Family”is a compact novel about a thirty-something woman writing to her on-and-off estranged brother who was adopted from Thailand at age three. She addresses issues such as her infertility and her research into the bureaucratic and psychological effects of international adoption. Unfortunately the author tells us nothing new on these topics. Furthermore she chooses to only name the brother while everyone else gets called “our mother”, “your brother-in-law”, etc., thus distancing us from the very characters that would have added some color and nuance, taken our attention away from droll, overused themes. That said, the novel is short, her writing is concise and I was happy to stick with the story until its conclusion.
July 26, 2021
This slim novel is a love letter to family and a meditation on both difference and infertility. The unnamed narrator details how her family changed when Danny, then three, joined then after being adopted in Thailand. While things on the surface appeared good, there were dark undercurrents. Danny struggled to adapt to the US and was bullied. Did that lead to his bad behavior as a teen? The narrator, while she clearly loves her brother, has also held back her secrets some of which come out in this soliloquy, written as a toast for Danny's wedding but which wanders far from that. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. A worthy debut.
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