In case you missed the announcement, “The Marriage Plot” is the new name for the online book club formerly known as “Literary Wives.” Part of our reasoning behind the rebrand was to be more inclusive in our thinking about love and roles in long-term partnerships. But even from that wider perspective, Laurie Frankel’s fifth novel, Family Family, ended up being an outlier, because there’s no central marriage or core partners. Instead, the book makes the point that “families get formed in all sorts of ways” and “look all sorts of ways and are made up of all sorts of people and still count as family.” Specifically, Frankel – and her flamboyant actress protagonist, India Allwood – want to counter traumatic adoption stories by showing that placing for adoption and/or adopting can be a first choice rather than a last resort.

{BEWARE SPOILERS IN THE REST!}

There are two narrative threads, one set across eight days in 2020 and another advancing in fits and starts from 1998 to meet up with it. In the former, India is in trouble with her agent and television studio for badmouthing the last movie she made because she felt it promulgated tired, negative stories about adoptees. One of her adopted Korean American twins, 10-year-old Fig, decides to come to her mother’s defense by locating the two children India gave up for adoption (Rebecca and Lewis), their biological fathers (Robbie and Davis), and the adoptive parents (Camille and the Andrews). En route to a big, messy, unlikely family reunion, alternating chapters fill in India’s career – from high school dramatics to her current superhero hit, Val Halla – and unconventional decisions about motherhood.

In terms of our club reads, this reminded me most of Lessons in Chemistry for how the protagonists resist marriage and prioritize independent vocations. All of the mothers on display are single parents: Camille and India, yes, but also India’s mother before her, who tells her, when she is first pregnant at 16, “having a baby has nothing to do with having a husband.” When India again falls pregnant unintentionally at age 20 (which does rather strain belief), she reminds herself, “parenting need not have anything to do with partnering.”

Long before I ever read a novel by Frankel, I’d come across a first-person piece she wrote for the Guardian about adopting a child from Korea. The experience of having a transgender child then led to her third novel, This Is How It Always Is (2017). I read that from the library because it had been a hit with my book club before I joined. There’s no denying the agenda behind either, but it was subtler in that earlier case. The characters here are quirky and their interactions amusing, but Frankel seems rather too pleased with her own wit. In addition, India is A Bit Much and Fig is on the verge of annoyingly precocious. Although the story bops along nicely, I would probably cut the page length by a third or more. So this was good-hearted fun, if overlong and moralistic. I’ll read more by Frankel, though, and I fancy appropriating India’s habit of keeping torn-up index cards in her pockets in case she needs confetti for an impromptu celebration. (Secondhand – Better World Books)

(Be sure to check out the reviews by Becky, Kate, Kay, and Marianne, too!)

The club’s next read will be The Eden Test by Adam Sternbergh, in December. I’m skipping this one as a) I couldn’t find an affordable copy and b) I didn’t fancy it. So the next read for me will be Wedded Wife by Rachael E. Lennon (March 2027) – I’m looking forward to it, as it will make a change for being nonfiction, and from a queer author.