We’re excited to announce October’s Skylarking Book Club pick: Any Other Family, by New York Times bestselling author, Eleanor Brown. This is a striking and intimate new novel about three very different adoptive mothers who face the impossible question: What makes a family?
Alex and Eleanor go back a long way - their first novels were both published by Amy Einhorn Books, over (eek) a decade ago now. Eleanor has kindly agreed to appear via Zoom to discuss the book and answer our questions. We’ll be meeting in the shop, as usual, on the final Thursday of the month - that’s October 27. Eleanor came to the very first Unbound Book Festival back in 2016, and anyone who heard her then will know that she is a brilliant and extremely entertaining speaker. All of which is to say: you won’t want to miss this.
Though they look like any other family, they aren’t one—not quite. They are three sets of parents who find themselves intertwined after adopting four biological siblings, having committed to keeping the children as connected as possible.
At the heart of the family, the adoptive mothers grapple to define themselves and their new roles. Tabitha, who adopted the twins, crowns herself planner of the group, responsible for endless playdates and holidays, determined to create a perfect happy family. Quiet and steady Ginger, single mother to the eldest daughter, is wary of the way these complicated not-fully-family relationships test her long held boundaries. And Elizabeth, still reeling from rounds of failed IVF, is terrified that her unhappiness after adopting a newborn means she was not meant to be a mother at all.
As they set out on their first family vacation, all three are pushed into uncomfortably close quarters. And when they receive a call from their children’s birth mother announcing she is pregnant again, the delicate bonds the women are struggling to form threaten to collapse as they each must consider how a family is found and formed.
Eleanor Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Weird Sisters and The Light of Paris, and the editor of the anthology A Paris All Your Own. An adoptive mother herself, Eleanor lives with her family in Colorado.
