Family Family

November 6, 2023
In Frankel’s exuberant if didactic latest (after One, Two, Three), an actor and adoptive mother faces online backlash over her new movie. India Allwood stars in Flower Child as a woman who gave up her daughter for adoption as a teen. After she and the film are accused on social media of capitalizing on others’ trauma (the movie suggests the characters’ drug addictions are the result of the adoption), she is unapologetic. Her adopted daughter, Fig, a fifth-grader, wants to help her mother, and she believes the public needs to know about Rebecca, the daughter India gave up for adoption as a teen. Fig tracks down Rebecca, now a headstrong teenager, online, but it turns out she has her own story to tell. She does so in a video that goes viral, further complicating the controversy around India and Flower Child. The emphasis on India’s strong opinions often makes the novel feel like a soapbox for Frankel, who has written in an author’s note and elsewhere about being an adoptive mother. (In one scene, India insists that a birth mother’s choice to give up her child can lead to a “win-win” situation for the birth mother and the child.) Still, Frankel offers a hilarious and sobering view of adoptive parenting through her portrayals of the cheerful and honest India and Rebecca’s open-minded adoptive mother, who pledges to tolerate top 40 music, because she recognizes that “shitty but trendy music was an unfortunate but unavoidable stage of adolescence.” When Frankel’s not banging her drum too hard, this is great fun.