goop Best Books of 2021
"Throughout Immediate Family, the narrator probes her identity as the older sister to a boy who confounds her, but also as the mother she longs to be. At the time of the wedding she has spent months undergoing fertility treatments, and her desire to reproduce . . . is both mirror and counterpoint to her parents’ aching, yearslong quest to adopt Danny." —Jessica Winter, The New York Times Book Review
"This short, unsparing novel is a beautiful and provocative snapshot of a family and the complicated, imperfect love that binds one member of it to another." —goop
“Ashley Nelson Levy’s unflinching debut novel, Immediate Family, puts a fresh and culturally relevant spin on the theme of adoption in literature . . . Nuanced and generously rendered . . . A unique, gorgeously textured narrative that explores the boundaries of familial love . . . Boldly embracing life’s entanglements, Levy’s novel is a work of powerful, life-affirming generosity.” —Ryan Smernoff, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Deeply moving . . . What a delight to find the same sensibility that pervades Transit [Books, cofounded by Levy]—a sharp aesthetic and moral intelligence, an embrace of subtlety and complexity, a taste for risk and daring—in every page of Immediate Family." —Katie Kitamura, BOMB
"Feels almost memoir-like in its realness." —Seija Rankin, Entertainment Weekly
"A beautifully raw ode to the bond between siblings." —Sabienna Bowman, PopSugar
"Touching and tightly crafted . . . Gifted with a lifelike finesse, the narrator's piercing tales of family and self are love-wrought, delivered in Levy's honed, beautiful writing." —Annie Bostrom, Booklist
"Wrenching . . . 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 . . . The smooth flights may remind readers of Donald Antrim’s novels. This exhibits a delicate touch while unpacking a complicated relationship, yielding much emotional insight." —Publishers Weekly
"Levy captures elusive ideas and intense emotions about transracial adoption and infertility." —Kirkus
"A book as intimate as a whisper between two old friends, late in the night, with no one to eavesdrop but the owls." —Catherine Lacey, author of Pew
“For all the orphans populating the pages of contemporary fiction, there are vanishingly few novels that honestly explore the complexities of adoption in modern America. Those of us whose immediate families are formed by this process will read Ashley Nelson Levy’s novel with recognition and revelation: it plumbs the ethical ambiguities, surveys the fault lines of race and privilege, creates space for the uncertainties and obligations so often written out. Composed with emotional candor and intellectual clarity, Immediate Family is about the improbable relentlessness of love. It's a testament to the reality that no family, regardless of origin or composition, is ever fully formed: most days the best we can do is keep each other from coming undone. It's a book that refuses tidy conclusions, and yet by the time I turned the last page, this book that had undone me had also left me magnificently whole.” —Anthony Marra, author of The Tsar of Love and Techno
“This unsparing and absorbing family portrait broke my heart and remade it a hundred times over. In prose that is distilled, astute, and precise, Immediate Family covers the territory of life that words are often insufficient for, those challenges that are at once isolating and universal—waiting, the imperfect love that binds a family, what you choose and what is chosen for you.” —Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
“This gorgeous debut opens with a request: the narrator's younger brother, Danny, has asked her to give a speech at his wedding. From there, the story unspools into an elegant, intellectual, and heartrending examination of the bonds and silence of a family complexly expanded—and completed—by Danny's transracial adoption. A stirring novel by a writer with uncanny insight and sensitivity, Immediate Family asks urgent questions about belonging, what makes a family, and the horizons of love. It moved me deeply.” —Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
"I've never read a love story like Immediate Family before—complex, challenging, sensitively and beautifully told. This is a gorgeous, affecting novel that probes the fissures and hidden places of familial love—and all its provocations and possibilities—and in so doing gets to the heart of love itself." —Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
2021-05-19
When she is asked to speak at her brother's wedding, a woman finds she has a lot to say.
"Sometimes when I picked up books from young writers at the library, I'd want to tear all the pages, chew them, and spit them out. Get a job! I would tell the characters. Money and blood never seemed to concern them." Money and blood are major concerns in Levy's debut novel, in which an unnamed narrator tells her brother all the things she wants him to know before she makes her wedding speech. Her brother, Danny Larsen, born Boon-Nam Prasongsanti, is the only named character in the book—the rest are "our mother and father," "your brother-in-law," "your bride." The narrator was 9 when she went with her parents to Thailand to adopt a 3-year-old from an orphanage. Among the immediate difficulties: He was dangerously malnourished; they didn't speak a word of Thai; he was terrified of their father. Her parents threw themselves wholeheartedly into the project of raising him, including making him a Life Book as recommended by the agency. The template for this book includes suggestions like "We don't know what the woman who gave birth to you in [Korea/India/Thailand] looked like, but because you are so [handsome/cute] we imagine that she must have been very beautiful." Racism and bullying became problems as soon as Danny went to school, but one thing went perfectly: The sister who was so excited to get a new sibling was rewarded with adoration. She would find messages in her shoe: "To my sister. Your [sic] the best sister in the whole world. From Danny Larsen." But as Danny grew into adolescence, he drifted away and also began to steal from their parents, eventually developing a compulsion that had huge consequences for everyone in the family—except him. This story unfolds in parallel with an account of the narrator's very painful and brutally medicalized experience with infertility. As the misery grows, the reader wonders...are they going to consider adoption? By the end of the book, it's clear that this narrative is a way of finding the answer to that question.
Levy captures elusive ideas and intense emotions about transracial adoption and infertility.
