What This Theme Explores
Found Family and Community asks what truly makes a family: biology or the daily work of choosing, protecting, and showing up for one another. The novel tests whether love can be actively built from strangers, and whether grief can be transformed into belonging through shared responsibility. It also probes how individual isolation yields to collective purpose when people are invited to contribute whatever they have—time, space, skills, or tenderness. Ultimately, it suggests that community is not stumbled upon so much as cultivated through acts of care that accumulate into commitment.
How It Develops
The theme begins in fragmentation. The sudden death of Willow's parents leaves Willow Chance orbiting alone, and the people around her are themselves solitary: Dell Duke in his unmoored, messy life; Pattie Nguyen and her children Mai Nguyen and Quang-ha Nguyen in a makeshift garage home; Jairo Hernandez circling the city in his cab. Their early meetings are incidental and transactional—strangers whose paths cross without altering one another.
Choice—not fate—begins the shift. Mai’s impulsive invention of a shared history with Willow in front of the authorities (Chapter 18) is the first intentional act of belonging. Pattie’s decision to take Willow in (Chapter 20) turns a lie born of compassion into a living arrangement, and Dell’s begrudging offer of space becomes an invitation to change. As they band together to clean Dell’s apartment so it can withstand outside scrutiny (Chapter 32), necessity becomes collaboration; collaboration becomes care. Routines form, roles emerge, and—crucially—each person is needed.
Their community deepens as they look outward. The courtyard garden project (Chapter 53) draws in neighbors like Henry Pollack, turning private healing into shared renewal. The theme culminates not just emotionally but legally: Pattie and Jairo petition for joint guardianship of Willow, making their chosen bonds visible and binding in public space (Chapter 60). When Willow closes the novel by naming the seven most important people in her life (Chapter 61), she affirms that what began as improvisation has hardened into family—a structure sturdy enough to hold them all.
Key Examples
- Mai’s Foundational Lie: In the chaos after the accident, Mai claims her family has long known Willow so social services won’t whisk her away. The choice is ethically messy but morally clear: she places relationship ahead of rules, seeding a family that exists because someone decided it should.
- Pattie’s Unconditional Embrace: Pattie, stretched thin, still opens her home and arms to a grieving child. Her pragmatic compassion turns emergency shelter into a steady center, modeling that family is built by the person who says yes when it would be easier to say no.
- The Transformation of Dell’s Apartment: Cleaning and furnishing Dell’s unlivable space so it can pass inspection forces everyone to contribute—labor, problem-solving, patience. A site of isolation becomes a communal home, showing how shared work creates shared identity.
- The Garden Project: Turning a barren courtyard into a thriving garden invites growth in every sense—beauty, food, routine, and pride. As neighbors like Henry Pollack join, the circle widens, proving that chosen family can radiate outward into a larger community.
- The Guardianship Hearing: Pattie and Jairo’s formal petition publicly acknowledges obligations they’ve already been living. Law catches up to love, and the state records what the heart has long known: this is a family forged by choice and sustained by care.
Character Connections
Willow is the story’s gravitational center, the person whose loss exposes everyone’s loneliness and whose presence offers them purpose. Her needs do not diminish her agency; instead, they create a structure in which others can give, grow, and belong.
Mai operates as the initiator and protector, embodying the moral courage to act first and justify later. Pattie becomes the stabilizer—firm, resourceful, and quietly tender—whose consistency allows fragile bonds to set. Together, they demonstrate a mother-daughter axis of chosen kinship that steadies the entire group.
Dell’s arc shows how being needed can redeem a drifting life. By offering space, then effort, then genuine care, he moves from self-absorption to stewardship, learning that belonging is less a feeling than a practice.
Quang-ha begins sullen and withdrawn, but the family structure creates room for his talent and work ethic to be seen. As he invests in the apartment and garden, his skepticism softens into attachment, suggesting that recognition is a doorway to connection.
Jairo represents the outer circle becoming inner kin. Inspired by Willow to reroute his own life, he reciprocates by stepping into guardianship, proving that family is open to anyone who will shoulder responsibility with love.
Symbolic Elements
The Gardens of Glenwood: The complex’s ironically sterile name contrasts with the barren reality the group inherits. As pathways, apartments, and the courtyard come alive, the setting mirrors the characters’ move from emptiness to interdependence.
The Courtyard Garden: The patch of hard dirt becomes a living ledger of their shared labor—seed, water, nurture, wait. Its growth tracks their own: fragile at first, then rooted, then abundant enough to feed more than the planters.
Dell’s Apartment: Initially a map of Dell’s disarray, the apartment’s cleanliness and warmth register the family’s imprint. Space itself becomes evidence that care accumulates into home.
Contemporary Relevance
In a world where many feel unmoored from traditional family structures, the novel reframes family as a verb: to family is to keep showing up. It honors the networks that arise in schools, neighborhoods, and online communities to meet needs that biology or institutions sometimes cannot. By celebrating interdependence over isolation, the story offers a hopeful blueprint: build something together, and belonging will follow.
Essential Quote
She lied.
She told the police that she’d known Willow for many years, not for only weeks.
She said that her mother would sign any paperwork because the families were very, very close.
This moment distills the theme into an act: family is created by choosing it, even before the feelings catch up. Mai’s lie is not deception for gain but a leap toward commitment that the others then honor with real care. The narrative suggests that such choices—risky, imperfect, and brave—are the first bricks in the house of found family.