Author: Eleanor Brown
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Genre: Fiction
Source: G.P. Putnam’s Sons ( Netgalley )

Goodreads: The New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters returns with a striking and intimate new novel about three very different women facing an impossible question: What makes a family?

They look just like any other family. But they aren’t a family like any other – not quite. Instead, they are three sets of parents who adopted four biological siblings, committing to keeping the children connected after the death of their grandmother.

Tabitha, who adopted the twins, is the planner of the group, responsible for coordinating playdates and birthdays and Sunday night dinners, insistent that everything happens just so. Quiet and steady Ginger, single mother to the eldest daughter, resists the forced togetherness, her own unsettled childhood leaving her wary of trusting too much. And Elizabeth is still reeling from going directly from failed fertility treatments into adopting a newborn, terrified that her unhappiness means she was not meant to be a mother at all.

But when the three women receive a surprising call from their children’s birth mother, announcing she is pregnant again and wants them to help her find an adoptive family for this child too, the delicate bonds they are still struggling to form threaten to collapse. As tensions rise, the women reckon with their own feelings about what it means to be a mother and what they owe each other as a family.

Set across the span of a family vacation, one full of boisterous laughter and emotional upheaval, Any Other Family is a thought-provoking and poignant look at how families shift and evolve and a striking portrait of motherhood in all its forms.

Ope’s Opinion: I can not believe Eleanor Brown’s imagination to come up with this story. The foul language was constantly throughout this whole book – I would have enjoyed it more without the language.

The first third of the book introduced the characters and explained the situation they shared.Seeing it from the perspective of each woman made it move very quickly.

The middle third of the book had a lot of repetitive information. Elizabeth whined the whole time about the same things. Tabitha had to be in control and wanted everyone to agree with her. Ginger was my favorite – she was kind of quiet, but stood up for herself.

The last third of the book was about resolving the conflict in the relationships. The end showed them all moving forward, but didn’t exactly wrap everything up.