Pick Me

While struggling with infertility, Candy and Frankie, a mixed-race couple living in Chicago, decide to adopt a Black child. Despite objections from their wildly different families, who beg the couple to go the more “traditional route,” Candy and Frankie schedule an appointment with the Department of Child Family Services in the hopes of finding not an infant, but a toddler—a child “no one else wants.” Beautifully rendered in a voice unlike any other in contemporary fiction, Pick Me grapples with notions of race, privilege, and ambition in the modern age – and the strain those forces can put on a relationship.