Review: Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray

This pacy novel begins with a letter. It’s 2023 and Eve is writing to Nell who has disappeared. They are childhood friends and also have a child together. The narrative proper begins the following year, when Eve is 30 and her daughter Lake is seven. A second strand takes us back to 2006 when 12-year-old Eve arrives as the new girl at Nell’s school. They bond over their outsider status, quick wits, and family lives which are unhappy in their own ways (Eve’s mother is “more like a flaky older sister”, Nell’s “knows nothing real about her children”). At first it seems clear that Nell and Eve will become romantically entangled, but Gray gives the friends-to-lovers arc an intriguing twist.

Gray observes the cruelty of school with drollness and pathos — and explores how such cruelty can extend into adulthood. Characters make harmful decisions (there’s a particularly diabolical one to look forward to at the climax), but Gray extends gaze both sympathetic and analytical over them.

When Eve escapes schoolyard homophobia, Chosen Family sings with queer joy. Meeting two gays at uni, Eve ecstatically thinks, “they are gay and they know she is gay and they are all gay together! It’s like a movie but it’s her life”. She immediately becomes a notoriously skilled womaniser. The queer gags come thick and fast, with all letters catching strays (“Eve knows that if she doesn’t provide specific seating for the bisexuals, they protest that they are being erased”). It’s hard to begrudge what feels a little rose-tinted when it’s this much fun.

Entertaining and sexy, with its focus on queer life post-AIDS and post-marriage equality, Chosen Family joins a new crop of queer Australian novels, such as those by Holden Sheppard, that focus on the possibilities of making family out of the shadows.

Gay rating: 5/5 for queer characters, relationships, explicit sex and themes.