Every Kind of Wanting
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Every Kind of Wanting explores the complex intersection of three unique families and their bustling efforts to have a "Community Baby." Miguel could not be more different from his partner Chad, a happy–go–lucky real estate mogul from Chicago's wealthy North Shore. When Chad's sister, Gretchen offers the couple an egg, their search for a surrogate leads them to Miguel's old friend Emily, happily married to an eccentric Irish playwright, Nick, with whom she is raising two boys. Into this web falls Miguel's sister Lina, a former addict and stripper, who begins a passionate affair with Nick while deciphering the mysteries of her past.
But every action these couples make has unforeseen consequences. As Lina faces her long–hidden demons, and the fragile friendships between Miguel and Chad and Nick and Emily begin to fray as the baby's birth draws near, a shocking turn of events—and the secret Lina's been hiding—threaten to break them apart forever.
By turns funny, dark and sexy, Every Kind of Wanting strips bare the layers of the American family today. Tackling issues such as assimilation, the legacy of secrets, the morality of desire, and ultimately who "owns" love, the characters—across all ethnicities, nationalities, and sexualities—are blisteringly alive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The plot of Frangello's (A Life in Men) latest sounds like it comes out of a feel-good Garry Marshall movie: Chad and Miguel, a wealthy gay couple in Chicago, set out to have a baby with the help of Chad's sister, Gretchen, and Miguel's old college friend Emily, in what Miguel's unstable, bipolar sister, Lina, who narrates much of the novel, dubs the "Community Baby Plan." But Frangello's uneven, though sometimes illuminating novel has a darker story to tell, one about how this "tangled knot of people," which also includes various spouses, siblings, and damaged children, gives way to "jealousy, entitlement, possession." As the baby plan goes awry, in ways both comically minor and heartbreakingly major, spouses begin to cheat and most of those involved start to realize that they're deluding themselves about their motivations. Frangello shifts the balance of the novel out of whack with her fond focus on Lina, whose most outwardly despicable acts Frangello forgives far more readily than those of the other characters. As Frangello twists the plot and adds unnecessary new strands, including the backstory of Lina and Miguel's childhood in Colombia, what begins as a comedy of manners turns into an overly soapy melodrama.
