Guest post by Melodie Edwards

When drafting my recently released novel, Once Persuaded, Twice Shy, a modern reimagining of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, one of the more difficult topics to tackle was the heroine Anne’s irresponsible and self-absorbed family.

All families have their flaws and tensions of course, along with their love and familial bonds, but there are those families whose members can create more toxicity and burden, than care and support.

Once Persuaded, Twice Shy: A Modern Reimagining of Persuasion by Melodie Edwards

In my novel Anne serves as the ultra-responsible (and stoic) member of just such a family. Her competent and caring mother passed away years before the novel starts, and Anne is now stuck with the burden of keeping financially afloat her vain and self-indulgent father and elder sister. The family had money and status, but the father has frittered it and the family home away. The situation is also frittering away the protagonist’s youth and hope for an independent life.

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The miasma of still loving one’s family, while trying to separate from their destructive habits is a well-tread theme in novels, and one that reflects real-life dilemmas.

Here are eight novels for your TBR, ranging from the light-hearted to the tragic, the classic to the modern, that showcase protagonists dealing with a burdensome family.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Let’s start with the classics. Jane Austen really owns the burdensome or troubled family trope; in addition to Persuasion, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice exemplifies the turmoil of loving a family that is less than supportive. While Elizabeth may have her sister Jane as a close friend, Mrs. Bennet and the remaining sisters are a serious source of embarrassment, so much so that in Darcy’s original (and disastrous) first proposal, he cites them as a reason for having resisted falling in love with Elizabeth. Ouch. Younger sister Lydia’s affair with Wickham plunges the family into further scandal and degradation, while Elizabeth watches on helplessly, having warned her father of just such a calamity. The happy ever after ending for Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy seem to be the focus of reader attention, but we’d do well to note the distance from the Bennett homestead that adds shine to Mr. Darcy’s offer.

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A Good Family by A.H. Kim

While we’re on the Austen theme, A.H. Kim has a modern retelling of Sense & Sensibility to be released this spring, but in the mean time you can check out her gripping novel A Good Family in which the beautiful and successful Beth Lindstrom, a pharma executive, is sentenced to do time in a women’s prison, and her sister-in-law must step in to care for her nieces in the aftermath.

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A Very Typical Family by Sierra Godfrey

Kim isn’t the only author to daringly tangle family relations with prison sentences. Sierra Godfrey’s A Very Typical Family puts the focus on adult siblings, as protagonist Natalie Walker returns home after her mother’s death and faces some turbulent family history – namely that over fifteen years ago, she was the reason for her older brother and sister going to prison. While we often use the term ‘second chance’ as a romance trope, here the second chance is a chance for Natalie to try and salvage a relationship with her siblings, having felt dragged down by their past bad behavior.

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At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen

In Sara Gruen’s masterful historical romance, At the Water’s Edge, Madeline Hyde grows up under the warped care of her emotionally abusive and mentally unstable mother. Ricocheting between her mother’s toxicity and her father’s indifference, she leaps at the chance to marry Ellis and escape, only to find out her marriage is less than ideal when her husband drags her on a mad quest to find the Loch Ness monster in the Scottish Highlands during the war. Not to give out too many spoilers, but the crux of the novel comes when Madeline realizes her husband is planning to use her mother’s reputation against her, in the worst possible way.

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Midnight at the Dragon Café by Judy Fong Bates

Judy Fong Bates’ novel, Midnight at the Dragon Café is a coming-of-age story, set in rural Ontario during the 1960’s, when protagonist Su-Jen’s family is the only Chinese family in town. There is untold pressure on Su-Jen whose future success is expected to fulfill all her family’s dreams, hard work and sacrifices in order to make their new life in Canada work. There is love in the family, but there is strife, and there are dark secrets that Su-Jen is beginning to glimpse as she grows older.

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Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny

Katherine Heiny’s novel Early Morning Riser is moving, naturalistic, and surprisingly funny. Jane is a single woman when she moves to Boyne City, Michigan, but a string of occurrences – falling in love with the town’s well-intentioned but well-circulated lothario, her mother’s car crash, and the needs of a vulnerable community member – has Jane constructing an unconventional family that she both strains to carry, and deeply loves.

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Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar

What family dynamic could be more fraught than one that includes the brilliant and tragic Virgina Woolf? Priya Parmar’s novel Vanessa and Her Sister does an incredible job of creating historic fiction that centers not on the famous Virgina, but instead on her long-suffering sister Vanessa. It is the responsible Vanessa who is left to parent the increasingly volatile Virginia after the death of their parents, and it is Vanessa who is left to worry about the mundanities of life such as the household accounts, while her younger siblings explore and begin to enjoy the artistic bohemian lifestyle of the Bloomsbury Group.

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The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

This list was meant to be a collection of fiction, but the penultimate book on the heartbreaking dual nature of both loving one’s family, and despairing at the burden they create, is actually a memoir. Jeannette Wall’s book The Glass Castle, details her turbulent, poverty-stricken upbringing, along with her three siblings, by her alcoholic father and often neglectful mother. Walls writes poignantly about her struggle as an adult to reconcile the unconventional love and lessons her parents gave her alongside the trauma, as well as trying to assist them while accepting that no amount of assistance will change their ongoing damaging choices.

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