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Apr 24, 2020Indoorcamping rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Wow. Something I didn’t think I’d ever be slightly interested in and couldn’t put it down. (Well, that’s not completely true. The end kind of drags.) You read to expand your perspective and to understand what it’s like in someone else’s shoes. This does that. And so much more. So well written that everything else I’ve read that I thought was well-written wasn’t in comparison. It’s perfectly on the line of painful and joyful, not cloying, not feel-sorry-for-myself, not smart, not selfish, nothing but perfectly balanced storytelling. Adoption from the perspective of the adoptee - and you didn’t really know what that felt like until this, unless you’re really good at empathy or lived it yourself. It’s the adoptee who always thinks, “What did I do to be rejected by my birth family?” And yet, a baby can’t have done anything, right? Except being the wrong sex, the wrong birth order, nothing that is the baby’s fault. Yet the guilt and the shame ruins the lives of people adopted into even perfect loving families. The people in the author’s story are so well-rounded and interesting, and probably not in real life, but they’ve stayed with me even now. I would read anything this author wrote, no matter what she writes about - she’s got it.