A Reading List Featuring Nontraditional and Adoptive Families
Here’s proof that they are just as good and loving—and just as complex and challenging—as any other family
By Laurie Frankel
My new novel, Family Family, is about, you guessed it, a family. In this case, a vast, wide-ranging one whose bounds are ever expanding. It’s about adoption—not just one adoption or one kind of adoption, but many. There are lots of books about adoption and even more about nontraditional families, but they’re so often either tragedies or tragedies narrowly avoided. Instead, I wanted to write about nontraditional families that are just as good and loving—and just as complex and challenging—as any other family. And those are the families I want to read about, too. See some of my favorites below.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
The deaf orphan at the center of this historical novel is truly imperiled only when he’s taken by the state from his adoptive families and institutionalized, whereupon not only his adoptive families but both of their communities—one Jewish, one Black, both marginalized—band together to rescue him and bring him home.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver relocates Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield to present-day Appalachia to revisit the same themes Dickens did: generational poverty, child labor, state neglect, addiction. And adoption and foster care. Dickens is great on orphans, and Kingsolver takes the mantle and runs with it. Demon is full of demons, indeed, but he finds several loving, supportive, nontraditional families along his way that get him through an otherwise impossible childhood.
A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung
Chung’s second memoir is about what happens when her parents—her adoptive parents—get sick without the extraordinary wealth and accompanying safety net required to access health care in America. It’s a heartbreaking story but an important one about all that unconditional love can fix—and all it can’t.
We Must Not Think of Ourselves by Lauren Grodstein
This beautiful and timely historical novel looks at the real-life archive project begun in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. It tells the stories of strangers thrown together into close, unsafe quarters and forced to rely on one another—and become a makeshift family—first out of desperation and then, ultimately, hope.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
This sprawling historical novel, set in Victorian England and Jamaica, is about so many different kinds of frauds but with one very real and entirely nontraditional family at its center. Its heroine, Mrs. Touchet, is not quite mother, not quite wife, not quite muse, and not quite caretaker of her family, but then again, she’s a little bit of all of the above and as wonderful a character as I’ve read in a long time.
Foster by Claire Keegen
This novella is a single-sitting read—and then a single-sitting reread because as soon as you finish, you’ll want to read it again. It’s an unusual story about a beautiful foster family, perfectly put together and inspiringly told.
Laurie Frankel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of novels such as The Atlas of Love, Goodbye for Now, and the Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine Book Pick This Is How It Always Is. Frankel lives in Seattle with her husband, daughter, and border collie.
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