A tender and fierce debut novel that explores of the bond between two siblings-one the biological child and one adopted from an orphanage in Thailand
It is the eve of her brother's wedding and Ashley 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. Ashley was nine in 1994 when she traveled with her parents to Rangsit Babies' Home in Thailand to meet her little brother, six years her junior. They grew up together like any other siblings, sharing a bucolic childhood in sleepy Petaluma, California. Yet when Ashley holds their history up to the light, it refracts in ways she doesn't expect.
What follows is Immediate Family, a gorgeous and painful narrative addressed to Danny, an attempt at a full accounting of their years together, and a confession, of sorts, to the ways in which Ashley has kept him out,...