A story of found family and acceptance.
Plot: Chloe has had it pretty sweet, all things considered. Though her mother has struggled with addiction, Chloe was adopted into a family that gave her stability and choices. Also, she never had to wonder whether her mother cared about her, it was obvious she did. Still, that makes for a tough relationship, so they hadn’t spoken in a good long while when her mom calls her up from the hospital. The issue? Well, as it turns out, mom had just delivered a baby she didn’t know she was carrying. Oops. Chloe drops everything to become this baby’s mother, but as a recent university graduate, she has the housing but not the reliable income to pass scrutiny with the adoption agencies. Thankfully, a new program has been introduced that pairs good potential parents with others that complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses. With no other option, she very reluctantly teams up with Warren (who himself had aged out of the system), a mechanic’s apprentice with a reliable income but no access to housing big enough for his teenage brother to live with him. Shenanigans ensue.
After I read this book, I read Pride and Prejudice, which I felt was a fairly superficial exploration of how we form assumptions and commit to them with limited substantiation, at our peril. This is a far deeper exploration of the same concept. Warren and Chloe shove each other into comically small boxes and try really hard to avoid anything that would disprove those assumption. But it isn’t treated as a deficiency in their character. Rather, they have both been really hurt, in different ways. They are intensely wary of putting their faith in anyone, and for good reason. They are resilient as hell, but over the course of the story, they also learn to trust, and it is absolutely fucking beautiful.
I am especially impressed with how Young handled the relationship between Chloe and her mother. Incidentally one of two books I’ve read recently that does an amazing job of depicting people with addictions as real, multi-dimensional people that are more than just their addiction, without sugarcoating the harm their addiction causes. A masterclass in characterization.
Audio is excellent if you can get it.