Immediate family /

This touching and tightly crafted debut from Levy, cofounder of the independent publisher Transit Books, is narrated by a woman asked to give a speech at her younger brother's wedding. Danny's desperate; his best man backed out, would she please step in? The question prompts her to look back on their whole lives together, putting to paper intimacies that would be difficult to speak. When the narrator was nine, she and her parents retrieved three-year-old Danny from a Thai orphanage. She recalls crystal-clear memories of that time and considers much more mature questions of what it was like for Danny to grow up in their white family in a small California town, questions that lead to the complex narratives of adoption in her family, society at large, and literature. At the same time, after long thinking she didn't want children, she and her husband are trying to conceive with continuous disappointment, and she can't tell Danny. Gifted with a lifelike finesse, the narrator's piercing tales of family and self are love-wrought, delivered in Levy's honed, beautiful writing.

A woman wrestles with her upbringing in a prolonged wedding toast in Levy's wrenching debut. Thai-born Danny Larsen, who was adopted by Americans, makes a last-minute request that his white sister, the unnamed narrator, fill in with a speech at his wedding after the best man backs out. In the speech, she rehashes her and Danny's tumultuous history, including their parents' five-year wait to adopt a child, beginning in 1989, before matching with three-year-old Danny, when the narrator was nine. Danny brings with him an obscured past and ferocious tantrums. As a teen, Danny begins charging expensive items to their parents' credit card without permission, which strains the family financially. The narrator also lays bare her struggles with infertility and describes her ambivalent feelings about adoption ("The fact that I could do this felt both convenient and questionable"). 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. 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. This exhibits a delicate touch while unpacking a complicated relationship, yielding much emotional insight. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative. (Aug.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.