Sometimes the shorter reads have the most thoughtful themes packed into them. The Relatives by Camilla Gibb, out March 23rd, is one such book. If you are looking for a quick thought provoking read that will help broaden your worldview, this is one to pick up! Take a look below at what this book is about and my thoughts after.
Lila is on a long, painful journey toward motherhood. Tess and Emily are reeling after their ugly separation and fighting over ownership of the embryos that were supposed to grow their family together. And thousands of miles away, the unknown man who served as anonymous donor to them all is being held in captivity in Somalia. While his life remains in precarious balance, his genetic material is a source of both creation and conflict.
What does it mean to be a family in our rapidly shifting world? What are our responsibilities to each other with increasing options for how to create a family?
As these characters grapple with life-altering changes, they will find themselves interconnected in ways they cannot have imagined, and forced to redefine what family means to them.
Content Notes: Addresses issues related to adoption, conceiving for non-straight couples, child abuse and captivity, murder, abduction.
Thoughts on The Relatives
Have you ever wondered if there are people in your family that you have never interacted with? Maybe parts of the family branch that you have lost touch with? What if there were people out there who played an important role in your existence but are not part of your life at all? I was fascinated by the synopsis of The Relatives and interested to learn about how the different narratives were related.
Focusing on three main characters, Lisa, Tess and Adam, The Relatives is a story that made me rethink what family is as well as become aware of new considerations. As the LGBTQ+ community grows and people start to live with the ones they truly love, not worrying about social images because times are changing, new questions start to come up.
Adam was a sperm donor for the longest time and a number of kids have been conceived because of him. He has never met any of them, but he is at a point in his life, when he has seen a lot and his partner wants to settle down and have kids with him. This leads him to reflect on who he is. His career as a spy has taken him many places and he has helped different identities at different points in time, but the role of a father is not something he has pondered before. Does donating the sperm make one a father? What are the lines between a birth parent and one who brings up the child?
There are two more stories in The Relatives and I loved how they are all connected. It took me some time to adjust to the three different POVs but halfway through, this book hit really hard for a few reasons that I will explain below.
On Family vs Career
One of the protagonists is Tess. She is a university professor working towards her tenure when her partner, Emily, wants them to have kids. They reach out to an agency, get sperm from a donor and they start to try. However, Emily is unable to conceive and Tess has to put her career on hold for sometime so that she can bring the child into the world. Her struggles with IVF are concisely expressed and I appreciated the brutal honesty that they came with.
Motherhood does not come naturally to everyone and that is why I loved Tess’ narrative. She is a parent and maybe she is not as doting as other parents but she also has an identity beyond a parent. Her career means a lot to her and as I have often discussed on the blog through books like Queen of the Owls, this is another picture on how hard it is for women in academia and the choices we have to make.
Through Tess, The Relatives also touches on the newer field of rights of the embryo, and in conjugation with Adam’s side of the story, what rights come with being the biological parent, if any.
On Not Making Mistakes
Lisa was a social worker who loves helping kids but sometimes she starts to care for them so much that she crosses boundaries. She is in her forties, without a partner, and all she wants is a child. The book begins and ends with her and I loved how this came full circle. As a child, she did not receive the love and care she wanted from her parents, and with the kids that she is helping out, she wants to be the one to save them. She wants to heal them because they have been harmed already. Her hesitancy around pregnancy added more dimension to the book and the terrors of bringing a child into this world and knowing that as the parent, we have so much influence, Lisa’s narrative does an amazing job at portraying the gravity of having kids. She does not want to make mistakes and it will take her sometime to realize through bringing up an actual time with a child, that no one is perfect.
One of the messages I took away from this book was through all the characters was that we all want to be loved and connected. Lisa, Adam and Tess wanted to be accepted for who they were and sometimes they had to fight for it.
On Questions
I don’t recall reading any books with gay couples who were trying to have kids. I have seen shows like How I Met Your Mother where they had kids but children were not the focus of the show. The Relatives made me wonder about the questions that kids would ask as they get older. Would they want to know their biological father who contributed his genetic material or the mother in whose womb they spent nine months? It makes sense that there are communities out there that help connect the parents and kids to the donors, or other kids who come from the same donors. These are the relatives who are not family but they are still related. They have a similar genetic make because they share a biological parent. What a wonderful world we live in!
The Relatives is a good book. The protagonists are older. I pondered about topics like motherhood, career and more, and I liked how all of that was packed together in this book. The end was fantastic and it brought tears to my eyes. If you are looking for a short book, pick up this one. There are so many aspects and situations in life that we only interact with through fiction and this is one of those books that offered me a lot of food for thought.
** The Relatives will be out on March 23. Be sure to check it out then! **
Amazon Print
Amazon Kindle
Many thanks to the publisher for the gifted copy via NetGalley.
Cover image: Cover Photo by bady abbas on Unsplash
Be First to Comment