distance between the reader and the narrator of the story, her husband, the children's parents and the children?

I’ll refrain from any additional spoilers, but there is one more element that is worth briefly noting. Dust jacket has expected scuffing, 1 1/2" closed tear along fold, 1/4" closed, tear at foot, still glossy, protected by a paper-backed Brodart sleeve.On this topic, this quote hit me particularly hard: “Maybe my childlessness had also bound me to our parents; my only concept of family was a nostalgic one. Feminism, Photography, Censorship, and Sexually Transgressive Imagery: The Work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witken, Jacqulyn Livingston, Sally mann and Catherine Obie' ".

This book is written from the perspective of a woman whose family adopted a boy from Thailand when she was 9 years old. It just isn’t much of a novel, if story and character and readerly engrossment are what you are hoping to find. This exhibits a delicate touch while unpacking a complicated relationship, yielding much emotional insight.It is clear that the narrator and her family were entirely unprepared for the racism — both in its subtler expressions (“People were always telling you how much better off you were in America”) and in its more overt forms (“With you there were establishments to avoid, places that quieted when we walked in the door. The parents were very saintly, although perhaps naive - Danny would only have abused my credit card the one time. Overall I absolutely loved this book which seemed to have its roots in real life for this author although that is purely speculation.

Other highlights include the narrator studying Victorian literature, discovering the two kinds of adoption plots most present (the adoptee either fixes or destroys the home), and eventually listing out many famous fictional and non-fictional adopted children. The author’s prose is spare and poetic, peppered with literary references and snippets from Danny’s adoption case file. This is a story about adoption and infertility, with the narrator (who is struggling to get pregnant) addressing her adopted brother and talking about the things she might say about him in her speech at his wedding. For more time than I’d like to admit, I think I believed deep down that a photograph only had artistic merit if it had been made in that “decisive moment,” a singular record of a vanished, unadorned slice of time. It’s also a confession of sorts to the parts of her life that she has kept from him, including her own struggle with infertility.Published in 1992, Immediate Family has been lauded by critics as one of the great photography books of our time, and among the most influential. It was Mann’s memoir, Hold Still (2015), that granted me a second, more profound revelation from Immediate Family. The paragraph goes on with some fine prose about her reaction to her parents’ bodies, which is nevertheless of mysterious relevance to this tale, and downright icky in a letter to a brother. Once a man came in with his girlfriend and looked at us waiting-room women as if we were contagious, as if he were going to start his period on the way home. Because of her difficult relationship with her adopted brother (our narrator was not adopted), she really didn’t consider adoption as an option and has very complicated emotions in response.