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. 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. 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. Because both transracial and transnational adoption are at work in the novel, this aside speaks directly to the drama of the main plot. The narrator also speaks at length about infertility which resonated less with me but was equally fascinating especially as it relates to adoption.

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. In addition to its contribution to what I hope will be a much-needed shift in our understanding of adoption, Levy’s novel exemplifies the power of the written word to penetrate the unknowns within ourselves and between us. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. 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 .With sublime dignity, acute wit and feral grace, Sally Mann's pictures explore the eternal struggle between the child's simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomy—the holding on and the breaking away. 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.

What became important wasn’t the imagined accuracy of the minutiae of an event, but to manifest truthfully the feelings it conjured. When I learned more about film formats and the camera she used to make the photographs of Immediate Family, the whole thing seemed incomprehensible. I want to know what the narrator and her husband do after they decide to discontinue fertility treatments. It seems unfathomably naive now, but at the time, it felt like permission had suddenly been granted—permission to sculpt the worlds I could see but was wary to create, permission to assemble moments I worried had been lost, and most importantly, permission to operate outside the construct of linear time. The main character is struggling to to create her own little family and dealing with infertility, all the while facing her complicated feelings around her brother, her own childhood and how her family came to be.Every moment seems to illustrate a transcendence, yes, but those moments remain ragged and of the flesh even as they float towards holiness. 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. 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. By working collaboratively with her children Mann uses these idealised family photos to create a narrative from her children's perspectives. With sublime dignity, acute wit, and feral grace, Sally Mann’s pictures explore the eternal struggle between the child’s simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomy―the holding on and the breaking away.

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.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. Her estrangement from Danny notwithstanding, the narrator continues to insist upon her unwavering love for her brother.