Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Title: What the River Knows
Author: Laurie Frankel
Genre: Fiction
Setting: New York, NY / California
Month Read: March 2024
Book Type: E-Arc
Publication: January 2024
Publisher: Henry Holt Publishers / Macmillan
Pages: 400
*Thank you to Net Galley and Henry Holt for my advanced E-copy. It has in no way influenced this review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
TRIGGER WARNING-
Adoption / Teen Pregnancy / Mentions of Abortion /
"I wanted an abortion, and also wanted to marry her and raise our baby together and be in love forever. I wanted always to ve a teenager and also to grow old with her. I wanted to go vack in time and prevent her from even getting pregnant. I wanted to make it all go away. I wanted to never have met her. I wanted to die. I wanted everything."
No Spoiler Summary:
“Not all stories of adoption are stories of pain and regret. Not even most of them. Why don’t we ever get that movie?”
India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward sixteen-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero.
Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do — she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie.
Soon she’s at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi, from protesters on the right and advocates on the left. Her twin ten-year-olds know they need help – and who better to call than family? But that’s where it gets really messy because India’s not just an adoptive mother…
The one thing she knows for sure is what makes a family isn’t blood. And it isn’t love. No matter how they’re formed, the truth about family is this: it's complicated.
Review:
I had a really hard time reading the beginning of this book because of many, many similarities India Allwood and I have shared in life. Parts of this novel were (horrifically???) auto-biographical for me, but ultimately India and I chose to go down very, very different paths. It was so interesting to me to see a pre-teen girl fall in love with theater as much as I did- and the catalyst being seeing a production of Guys & Dolls was hysterical (and scary) to me. Mine was a dinner theater production in 2003 somewhere in Virginia on a school trip- where I realized quite fast there was nothing else on this earth I wanted to do in my life. I still haven't gotten to play Adelaide, but one day...
This book was surprisingly therapeutic for me. Imagine getting pregnant as a teenager and seeing the path not chosen written out so interestingly in a random novel you asked for because it was a Book of the Month pick. I didn't agree with everything India did--- I don't think I would have made the same mistakes twice... but her utter selflessness was really interesting to me. Her choosing to decide that giving people blessings meant she was deserved her own blessings in return was such a weird way to think about teenage pregnancy- but also so inspiring? India's tenacity and drive were so great, and she worked so hard for everything in her life. It was so refreshing in books that are, typically, very sad dramas.
The supporting cast of characters in this novel were incredible, and I wish we could have gotten more. From India's children, to her ex boyfriends, to her mom, to her colleagues, to the very hateable reporter, everyone in this book was such a good time whether you loved or hated them- and each character had such a specific purpose it was incredible watching the plot weave itself together. Questions you didn't even know to ask got answered, and I thought that was incredibly fun.
Recommendation:
Stories Featuring Adoption:
Any Other Family by Eleanor Brown
Home Bound by Vanessa A Bee
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
"...knew miracle and loss were swings not seesaws."