Handle with Care: A Novel. Jodi Picoult. 2009. 496p. Atria. When Charlotte and Sean O’Keefe’s daughter, Willow, is born with severe osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle-bone disease), they are devastated—she will suffer hundreds of broken bones as she grows, a lifetime of pain. As the family struggles to make ends meet to cover Willow’s medical expenses, Charlotte thinks she has found an answer. If she files a wrongful-birth lawsuit against her ob/gyn for not telling her in advance that her child would be born severely disabled, the monetary payouts might ensure a lifetime of care for Willow. But it means that Charlotte has to get up in a court of law and say in public that she would have terminated the pregnancy if she’d known about the disability in advance—words that her husband cannot abide, that Willow will hear, and that Charlotte cannot reconcile. And the ob/gyn she’s suing isn’t just her physician—it’s her best friend. Handle With Care explores the knotty tangle of medical ethics and personal morality. When faced with the reality of a fetus who will be disabled, at which point should an OB counsel termination? Should a parent have the right to make that choice? How disabled is too disabled? And as a parent, how far would you go to take care of someone you love? Would you alienate the rest of your family? Would you be willing to lie to your friends, to your spouse, to a court? And perhaps most difficult of all—would you admit to yourself that you might not actually be lying?

Throughout the story, the question is raised of what it means to be a mother. For Charlotte, it means doing anything in her power to provide the best life for Willow, but at the same time, her other daughter’s suffering goes unnoticed as she develops bulimia and begins cutting herself. For Marin Gates (an attorney employed at the firm retained by Charlotte in her lawsuit), the question of what it means to be a mother addresses the issues of her adoption. Is a mother someone who gives birth and gives you away, or the woman who raises you? Discuss the different ideas about mothering that the author presents in this book. At what moments do certain characters fail or succeed at being a mother?

Photo by Hillery Stone

Happy Family. Wendy Lee. 2008. 240p. Grove/Atlantic, Inc. When Hua Wu arrives in New York City, her life seems destined to resemble that of countless immigrants before her. She spends her hectic days in a restaurant in Chinatown, and her lonesome nights in a noisy, crowded tenement, yearning for those she left behind. But one day in a park in the West Village, Hua meets Jane Templeton and her daughter, Lily, a two-year-old adopted from China. Eager to expose Lily to the language and culture of her birth country, Jane hires Hua to be her nanny. Hua soon finds herself in a world far removed from the cramped streets of Chinatown or her grandmother’s home in Fuzhou, China. Jane, a museum curator of Asian art, and her husband, a theater critic, are cultured and successful. They pull Hua into their circle of family and friends until she is deeply attached to Lily and their way of life. But when cracks show in the family’s perfect façade, what will Hua do to protect the little girl who reminds her so much of her own past? A beautiful and revelatory novel, Happy Family is the promising debut of a perceptive and graceful writer. About the Author: Wendy Lee is a graduate of Stanford University and New York University’s Creative Writing Program. She worked for two years in China as a volunteer English teacher and now lives in New York City. Her first novel, Happy Family, was named one of the top ten first novels of 2008 by Booklist. She was awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship in the fall of 2008 and is currently working on her second novel. Visit the author’s website.

Hayburn Family, The. Guy McCrone. 1952. 279p. Farrar, Straus & Young. The last novel in the Moorhouse Family Saga, this book opens in the year 1900, when Robin, the adopted son of Henry and Phoebe Hayburn, is discovered to be tuberculous. Pictured: 1970 Remploy/Howard Baker Books Reprint.

Heartbreak Lounge, The. Wallace Stroby. 2005. 336p. St Martin’s Press. Ex-state trooper Harry Rane, who first appeared in Wallace Stroby’s brilliant debut novel, The Barbed-Wire Kiss, is at loose ends. Doing some investigative work for a friend’s firm just to keep himself busy, Harry meets Nikki Ellis, a woman desperate for help. Her ex, Johnny Harrow, was just released from prison after a seven-year stretch for attempted murder. Nikki hasn’t spoken to him since he went down, but she knows what he’s capable of, and that he’ll be looking for her-and for the baby she put up for adoption after Johnny went away. She knows it’s up to her to protect the child once again. And she’s afraid. As Harry finds out, she should be. Johnny is headed home to New Jersey to settle up with anyone who did him wrong while he was gone, including Nikki and his former employer, mobster Joey Carlo. Then he’s planning to find his son and start a new life. Johnny starts at the Heartbreak Lounge, where Nikki was a dancer when she first met Johnny, and works his way through their old life, leaving a trail of blood and fear in his wake. Only Harry might be tough enough—or reckless enough—to help her. What happens next shows why the searing talent and explosive writing evident in The Barbed-Wire Kiss was only the beginning, and why Wallace Stroby is destined to be one of the finest crime writers of a generation.

Hearts Do Not Break. Josephine Lawrence. 1960. 248p. Harcourt, Brace & Co. As one of the staff members of the Mary Belle Reade Foundation, a private philanthropic organization whose primary concern is with foster-home care, Lisi Ivers can bear witness to the anguish of foster mothers called upon time after time to relinquish children they have cared for as if they were their own. She knows, also, the damaging effect that being transferred from one foster home to another has upon children who are ineligible for outright adoption. The most poingnant situation that confronts her, however, involves a childless woman, Irene Bedell, who, having fund it impossible to adopt a baby legally, surrenders to the temptation of the “gray market,” and so paves the way for almost unbearable pain and loss.

Heat of the Moment. Philippa Blake. 1997. 218p. Orion. An intelligent tale of a family still haunted by a murder long-ago in far-away Kenya. British writer Blake (Waiting for the Sea to Be Blue, not reviewed, etc.) deftly evokes the country now and as it was in the last days of the Raj in this story of London banker Michael Ballantyne. With a glittering r‚sum‚, an old family name, and a career in the making, Michael lacks only a wife. Then he meets Olivia Jones in his dentist’s office, of all places, and is smitten. Olivia falls for him, too, but she’s hardly typical banker’s-wife material: Her mother Eugenie is living in a hospital for the insane, and Olivia herself is about to head off to the Kenya desert, hoping to convince her brother David, a teacher at a mission school, to visit Eugenie, whom he has not seen since she was tried for murder. When Olivia somehow goes astray in the wilds, Michael flies out to Kenya to find her—and, while awaiting news, hears the family’s story from her Aunt Jessie. He discovers how Eugenie fled Africa and her handsome scoundrel husband, Gareth, for England, bringing their children along; how she later became reconciled with Gareth and was persuaded to rush back to Kenya, where he again abandoned her. Eugenie, penniless and pregnant with David, permitted childless Harry and June Crane, whom she’d met on the boat from England, to adopt him. But, increasingly unable to accept the adoption, she began stalking the child, the poignantly absent yet not hopelessly distant object of her increasingly deranged affection. Finally, the accidental death of her older son led her to attack June fatally with a knife. Now, back in the desert, Olivia, ill and dehydrated, is rescued by a tribesman. The lovers are eventually reunited, although not before Michael has been tested severely by people and a way of life alien to the board room and the Ballantyne estate. A refreshingly sensible take on sensational crime. — From Kirkus Reviews. Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Henderson’s Spear. Ronald Wright. 2002. 368p. Henry Holt & Co. From the Publisher: A masterly epic that weaves a contemporary search for a missing father with a vivid story from the heyday of the British Empire. Liv, a Canadian filmmaker, is writing from a Tahitian jail, piecing together her troubled past and her family’s buried history for the unknown daughter she gave up at birth. The search for her own father, a pilot missing since the Korean War, has brought her to the South Seas and landed her behind bars on a trumped-up murder charge. In the stillness of her cell, Liv ponders the secret journal of her ancestor, Frank Henderson, who came to these same waters a century before on an extraordinary three-year voyage with Queen Victoria’s grandsons—Prince George (later George V) and Prince Eddy, who would die young and disgraced, linked by the gutter press to the Ripper killings and many other scandals. Through unforgettable characters and a mesmerizing story, Henderson’s Spear traces two tales of obsession, intrigue, and loss—from the 1890s and the 1990s. These stories reach around the world from Africa, England, and North America to converge with compelling effect in the Polynesian islands. With a deep understanding of the landscape and culture of the South Sea Islands, Henderson’s Spear explores the patterns of history and the accidents of love. About the Author: Ronald Wright’s critically acclaimed first novel, A Scientific Romance, was a New York Times Notable Book. His nonfiction includes Stolen Continents, an award-winning history of the Americas, and Time Among the Maya. He lives in Port Hope, Ontario.

Highwire Moon. Susan Straight. 2001. 320p. Houghton Mifflin Co. Serafina is a young Mexican Indian girl desperate to leave her impoverished existence in Oaxaca. Emigrating illegally to California, adrift on her own, she becomes involved with Larry Foley, a feckless trucker and occasional speed freak. When a baby daughter, Elvia, is born, SeraÞna cares for her tenderly until the day she is forcibly separated from her child and deported. Elvia, who has known nothing but sheltering love, is thrust into foster care. Eventually reclaimed by her father, she shares his chaotic life until she becomes pregnant at fifteen. In a frenzy of fear and despair, she is filled with an overwhelming need to find her mother. Her quest leads her into the world of migrant farm labor, where bitter toil, violence, and sexual predation make clear how little has changed since the Joad family harvested the grapes of wrath. With unfailing compassion and profound emotional truth, Highwire Moon takes us into a hidden universe of love, pain, and hope. It not only will appeal to Susan Straight’s many ardent admirers—almost a cult readership now—but will find many new ones. About the Author: Susan Straight is the author of three novels, including I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, and a collection of stories, Aquaboogie. Her work has won numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim fellowship and a Lannan Foundation grant. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and is the mother of three young daughters.

Honest Illusions. Nora Roberts. 1992. 383p. Putnam Publishing Group. From Publishers Weekly: Roberts combines conventional elements—sizzling sex, a cunning villain, a captivating story, some tugs at the heartstrings—then adds a twist (the good guys are criminals), and the result is spellbinding. Max Nouvelle is the patriarch of a family of magicians and jewel thieves made up of Lily, his partner in love; Roxanne, his headstrong, beautiful daughter; and Luke, the abused runaway Max had taken in years ago, now a charming young man. They join Max in elaborate performances onstage and in equally elaborate robberies. For years Roxanne and Luke battle constantly, but as young adults they finally realize they are deeply in love. Luke, haunted by the fear that his past will hurt his adopted family, is the target of coldblooded Sam Wyatt, driven by a vow of revenge on the Nouvelles. Luke returns from a forced five-year disappearance for the biggest performance of the Nouvelles’ career—a simultaneously executed grand heist and act of vengeance. Although Roberts’s deft narrative shows occasional excesses (mostly of description and stereotypical characterizations), none of these will deter the reader from taking this diverting journey into a world of magic, passion and mystery. © 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Horsemaster, The. T Alan Broughton. 1981. EP Dutton. Author’s third novel, the “story of a man who faces a confrontation with the past that he cannot ignore and that changes his life forever” when a daughter returns.

Hot Day in May, A. Julian Jay Savarin. 2004. 233p. Severn House Publishers. From Kirkus Reviews: An aristocrat who holds down a Hauptkommissar’s post on the Berlin police force, investigates the long-ago deaths of his parents: a fable of fathers and sons in a Germany that’s anything but unified. Six months ago, Count Jens Muller learned that the father and mother who died in an airplane they were piloting when he was only a boy were actually subjects of a murder for hire. Now that he’s finished sitting on that intelligence and is ready to look closer, revelations come thick and fast. His titled father was really a double agent for the West, working deep inside the Stasi. And Muller, who’s inherited so much of his father’s attachment to secret-agentry, has inherited some of his enemies as well. The assassins who’ve targeted a visiting peace activist from the Mideast have seen that the younger Muller is just as pesky as his father and determined to eliminate him. And Muller’s superior, Polizeidirektor Heinz Kaltendorf, seems pathetically or willfully supine when he’s confronted by the killers’ obvious menace. Luckily, Muller has reliable allies, from his old friend Oberkommissar Pappenheim to his new acquaintance Timothy Wilton-Greville, his aunt Isolde’s first husband. Ex-spy Greville knows the burdens of filial duty firsthand in the worst way. The son of a man he killed in the line of duty, a boy whose adoption and education he arranged for, is now a professional killer who aims to combine business with pleasure by liquidating Greville. Little does the killer know that Greville is carrying a lethal time bomb of his own. A conscientious review of postwar Germany’s painful family legacies, though a bit muffled by the fact that some of the mostinteresting characters are long dead and the denouement is evidently reserved for a later volume in the series. About the Author: Born in Dominica, Julian Jay Savarin was educated in Britain and took a degree in history before serving in the Royal Air Force. He lives in England.

Hot Springs. Geoffrey Becker. 2010. 320p. Tin House Books. Vibrant, sexy, and quite possibly crazy, Bernice is determined to reclaim the child she gave up for adoption five years ago. She convinces her boyfriend, Landis, to help carry out her plan, but once the abduction is accomplished, Bernice—whose own mother was given to manic episodes and strange behavior—is plagued with doubts. Will Landis stay with her, given her volatile personality and his own drifter past? Will she and Landis both end up in jail for this crime? And, perhaps most importantly, will she fail at being a mother? Dovetailed with this is the story of the conservative Christian adoptive parents, Tessa and David, and the effect the kidnapping has on their troubled marriage. As Bernice and Landis journey across America, from Colorado Springs to Tucson to Baltimore, Bernice must confront her past and the secrets she has kept.

House of Waiting. Marina Tamar Budhos. 1995. 220p. Global City Press. House of Waiting is a sweeping, lyrical first novel by Marina Tamar Budhos that charts the stormy marriage between Sarah Weissberg, the sheltered adopted daughter of Orthodox New York Jews, and Roland Sing, a charismatic Indo-Caribbean man. The two are drawn together by their passion and a shared sense of being outsiders in 1950s America. When Roland leaves his wife in New York almost immediately after their marriage to seek his destiny in a bitter political struggle in his native British Guiana, Sarah creates her own community with his East Indian friends in a summer house in upstate New York. Ultimately, she gains the strength to make a dangerous journey to the Caribbean to save her marriage and learn the truth about her husband.

How to Leave a Country. Cris Mazza. 1992. 179p. Coffee House Press. From Library Journal: A darkly fascinating story about the strange relationship between sculptor Phelan and painter Tara. Tara can recall Phelan’s past but not her own. She doesn’t even recognize her own paintings, which were apparently inspired by Phelan. As the novel unfolds in Tara’s recollection of Phelan’s past—his life in an adopted family, his obsession with chess games, his work for a nursing home, and his shattering experience as an artist-in-exile in Brazil—the reader is presented with a life full of failed aspirations, sexual disappointments, and interpersonal collapses. —Cherry W. Li, Dickinson Coll. Lib., Carlisle, Pa. / Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

I Know This Much Is True. Wally Lamb. 1998. 900p. Harper Collins. Dominick Birdsey’s entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother’s watchful “monkey”; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother’s gentle “bunny.” From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness—and ultimately self-protection—in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. But Dominick’s talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick’s lives. Through his grandfather’s life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors’ transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin.

I Looked Out Tilt: A Southern Gothic Novel. Henry Wyath Gurley. 2008. 388p. Headlight Press. Set in the fictional town of Portman, Texas, beginning in the 1920s, the novel reaches from the slave-trading days of Western Africa to South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana. The storyline comes together as a cohesive saga over a span of almost fifty years. The eventual protagonist, Finis Anderson, narrates the retrospective history of the community from notes and journals left to him by his parents and by his grandmother.

Ida Mae. Delores J Thornton. 1997. 211p. Marguerite Press. In this first novel, Ida Mae, the protagonist, deals with life on the other side of the color line. She is a young girl of color, orphaned at an early age, and adopted by white parents. Set in Cedartown, Georgia, in the 1950s, her situation proves to be challenging in a turbulent time of our history. “I was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. Cedartown, Georgia is my mother’s birthplace, and I’ve visited on occasion. It seemed like the perfect place for this novel. I share Ida Mae’s love of country music; that was the inspiration for this book.” — Delores Thornton.

If You Lived Here: A Novel. Dana Sachs. 2007. 336p. William Morrow. Shelley Marino has never been able to conceive. As the possibility of adopting a child from Vietnam suddenly becomes a reality, Shelley throws herself into planning for the new arrival. Her husband Martin, who served in Vietnam, already raised two sons from his first marriage. Having seen the horrors of war, he worried about his children every minute, and doesn’t know if he could bear to do it all over again. The impending adoption and Martin’s memories of Vietnam raise ghosts he’s that he’s kept buried all these years, and he and Shelley begin to drift apart. Shelley’s friend, Mai, was born in Vietnam and has been in the U.S. almost two decades, yet has never truly found a home here. A tragic accident the day she left for America has haunted Mai. Now, through her friendship with Shelley, she will face her fears and the family she left behind. All three must reconcile their pasts to embrace their futures. About the Author: Born in Memphis, TN, Dana Sachs is a freelance journalist whose writing has appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers, including National Geographic, the International Herald Tribune, and the Boston Globe. Her memoir of her time in Vietnam, The House on Dream Street, was published in 2000. She has translated Vietnamese novels into English and co-directed the award-winning documentary about Vietnam, Which Way Is East. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, she teaches journalism and Vietnamese literature courses at UNC-W and lives with her husband and two sons in Wilmington, NC.

If You Walked in My Shoes. Gwynne Forster. 2004. 293p. Dafina Books. From Booklist: Coreen Holmes Treadwell is well respected in Bakerville, North Carolina, but when she is called to testify before a senate committee, she is paralyzed with fear that her secret will be revealed. While in high school, she was raped and became pregnant. Thrown out by her parents, she gave the baby up for adoption, went to college, became a hardworking and valued social worker, and married a man named Bates, becoming stepmother to his two children. Now she is afraid that Bates will find out about her past troubles and that she’ll lose his love and respect. Meanwhile, unknown to Coreen, her child, Frieda, is looking for her and seeking revenge because her adopted father abused her. Mother and daughter are on a collision course that brings out the worst in both women, causing them to jeopardize the good in their lives. Forster’s understated style allows for an insightful inquiry into the plight of African American women and the men who abuse them. — Patty Engelmann; © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

Imaginary Life, An. David Malouf. 1978. 1985. 154p. Braziller. In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it. About the Author: David Malouf is the author of ten novels and six volumes of poetry. His novel The Great World was awarded both the prestigious Commonwealth Prize and the Prix Femina Estranger. Remembering Babylon was short-listed for the Booker Prize. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

In a Country of Mothers. AM Homes. 1993. 275p. Knopf. A shrink convinces herself that one of her patients is her lost daughter: the strong premise has a weak follow-through in Homes’s first novel for adults (after her YA novel Jack, 1989, and her 1990 story collection, The Safety of Objects). When Claire Roth was in college, she became pregnant by her English professor. Dead-set against a back-alley abortion (this was 1966) and getting no sympathy from her ice-cold WASP parents, Claire was forced to give up her baby for adoption (by a Jewish family, she insisted). Now 43, a successful Manhattan therapist with a good marriage and two sons, she is still haunted by that early loss, still self-punishing. Her newest patient is Jody Goodman (whose viewpoint alternates with Claire’s). The outwardly self-confident Jody, who works for a film producer, is getting the jitters over her imminent departure for UCLA’s film school. Despite a wonderfully helpful mother, Jody has always had problems making changes and getting close to people. Is this related to her adoption? When Claire first sees the possibility that Jody is her daughter (times and places jibe), the therapist considers her own violent reaction as a countertransference problem; but then Claire starts behaving unprofessionally, fawning over Jody while neglecting her own family. After this tension, there is a falling- off. Jody leaves for California, escorted by her mother, and the only way Homes can reconnect her protagonists is to have Jody fly back east with a Mysterious Virus, while Claire is spinning her wheels. The climax is effectively ghoulish but resolves nothing. Snappy dialogue, transparently clear style, and characters handled with just the right amounts of sympathy and acerbity: Homes has a bright future—but, for now, readers have this intriguing if ultimately disappointing debut.—Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In Perfect Light. Benjamin A Saenz. 2005. 336p. Rayo. From Kirkus Reviews: A poignant tale of a Mexican American community in El Paso as it faces the legacy of child prostitution. Poet and novelist Saenz (The House of Forgetting, 1997) is well attuned to the plight of these very real-seeming characters: a young Mexican man, Andres Segovia, coming to terms with having been sexually abused as a boy, is arrested in a drunken brawl and turns to the gringo pro-bono lawyer, Dave, who has gotten him out of scrapes before. When the man Andres has beat up dies—a sex offender out on parole whom Andres remembers raping him at age 12—Dave hands his case over to a kind of miracle-working lawyer of the underdog, Grace Delgado, a widow who has plenty of troubles of her own. At 50, she has just been diagnosed with breast cancer, although she eschews any treatment; her grown son, Mister, has married a woman Grace doesn’t like, and the two inform her they plan to adopt the child of severely dysfunctional parents, further straining relations among them all. As Grace works patiently with Andres, his horrific story unravels: orphaned when his parents were killed in a car accident, he and his siblings tried to make a self-sufficient life for themselves, until his beloved brother, Mando, ran afoul of the law and the younger children became prey to criminals who robbed them of their youth. In brisk, short, stream-of-consciousness chapters, Saenz keeps these several strains of the story simmering: Dave struggles with his guilty conscious while Grace, confronting her own crisis of mortality, attains a kind of religious redemption in helping Andres, who in turn needs to find a purpose to live. Mister’s attempts at adoption of the troubled toddler convulses the plot tragically, althoughSaenz saves the mess from turning into a bloodbath by carefully delineating his characters. A vivid story about a community of scarred, deeply human souls within a callous, indifferent America. About the Author: Benjamin Alire Sáenz was born in his grandmother’s house in Old Picacho, New Mexico—a farming village forty miles north of the border between Mexico and the United States. He is the author of Carry Me Like Water, In Perfect Light, Flowers for the Broken, House of Forgetting, and has also written several volumes of poetry and children’s books. In addition to winning an American Book Award for his collection of poetry Calendar of Dust, he is also a former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of a Lannan Poetry Fellowship. He teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.

In Search of a Stranger. Warren E Siegmond. 1981. Cameo Press. An adoptee’s heartbreaking search for her real mother, and how, after 31 years, she unlocked the forbidden secrets of her birth. (Although this novel is based on an adoptee’s actual search for her birth mother, the dates, locations, organizations, events and characters are strictly fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)

In Search of Eden. Linda Nichols. 2007. 448p. Bethany House. A girl who has never been able to settle down, Miranda begins various adventures, but whenever reality begins to tarnish her dreams, she gives up. As she approaches her thirtieth birthday, she determines to reinvent her life. But there’s one loose end to tie down first. Joseph North, the chief of police in Abingdon, Virginia, always tries to do what is right, to perform his duty and protect those he loves. He becomes suspicious of the new woman in town, and after checking further, he discovers she has no history. Then he finds a baby picture of his niece in her possession. In Search of Eden is a story about law and grace, about forgiveness and redemption, about finding joy and rest in a broken world. About the Author: Linda Nichols, a graduate of the University of Washington, is a novelist with a unique gift for touching readers’ hearts with her stories. She is also the author of the acclaimed novels If I Gained the World and At the Scent of Water. She and her family make their home in Tacoma, WA.

Inconceivable. Ben Elton. 1999. 329p. Bantam (UK). When Lucy first suggested they make a baby, Sam was gung ho—after all, sleeping with his wife is one of Sam’s favorite things to do. Then out came the thermometers, followed by the holistic home remedies—not to mention some humiliating bouts with specimen jars. Soon Lucy’s demands are driving Sam out of his mind. That is, until Sam conceives a plan of his own: He’ll write a screenplay based on his and Lucy’s poignant (and often uproarious) efforts to conceive a child. It could be a big hit. It might even make Sam’s career. Or cost him his marriage...

Inner Harbor. Nora Roberts. 1999. 382p. Jove Books. Inner Harbor, the highly anticipated close to the story of “the lives and loves of three brothers on the windswept shores of the Chesapeake Bay” that began in Sea Swept and Rising Tides, finds Philip, the last unwed Quinn brother, juggling his high-powered advertising job and his newfound family duty of helping to care for his young adopted brother, Seth. When Dr. Sybill Griffin shows up in the sleepy town of St. Christopher, Philip makes room in his hectic schedule for the mysterious woman who stirs his senses and threatens to steal his heart. And while Sybill can’t deny her own growing feelings for the charismatic Quinn, the secret connection to Seth that she hides may destroy any chance that the two young lovers have at happiness. Full of heartwarming familial moments, tender romance, and a touch of tension, Inner Harbor is an outstanding conclusion to a truly stunning trilogy. Other Titles in the Series: Sea Swept (1998); Rising Tides (1998); Chesapeake Blue (2002).

Inheritance, The. Tom Savage. 1998. 288p. Dutton. Most people only daydream the possibility; for Holly Smith, who’s only just discovered that she was given up for adoption as a newborn, the dream turned to reality—then a nightmare. The California girl who has lived a comfortable, middle-class life with her adoptive parents finds herself heiress to a vast fortune and massive house on the East Coast. But from the moment she steps across the threshold of the mansion that is now hers, she feels the chill emanating from those who see her as the interloper—the woman who robbed them of what was rightfully theirs. And only her death will satisfy the lurking presence determined to wrest from her slender hands the inheritance that is rightfully—whose? With The Inheritance, Tom Savage has created a modern Gothic novel brimming with ever-mounting suspense.

Interruption of Everything, The. Terry McMilan. 2005. 384p. Viking Adult. From Kirkus Reviews: The sparks fly in McMillan’s latest, a crowded family drama with two midlife crises competing for attention. Marilyn Grimes suspects she’s premenopausal, but tests show she’s seven weeks pregnant. This is bittersweet news for the narrator, who has spent 23 of her 44 years being a model housewife and mother in her middle-class neighborhood of Oakland Hills, across from San Francisco. She’s raised three kids, now grown, while her engineer husband, Leon, has been a good provider, though the fun has gone out of their marriage. Then new tests show the fetus is dead, which is pure relief for Marilyn, though she still has her hands too full to focus on self-fulfillment: an MFA program, a business venture. Down in Fresno, her mother, Lovey, is becoming senile, and Marilyn’s much younger adopted sister, Joy, can’t cope: A drug addict, she can’t even raise her own two kids, Tiecey and LL, so Marilyn must periodically descend from what Joy derisively calls her “little Cosby world” to help out. That little Cosby world is topsy-turvy too. Not only has Arthurine, Leon’s far from senile mother, who lives with them, suddenly started dating, but one of Marilyn’s sons is home on spring break, bringing his girlfriend and a bunch of homeboys-and staid old Leon is turning into a homeboy himself, looking ludicrous in new baggy jeans. When he announces he’s off to Costa Rica to find himself and may be leaving Marilyn for good, she goes ballistic. McMillan is at her best juggling all these different characters. Bring ’em on! And the zingers are blistering. The second half is less turbulent, until news comes that Joy is dead. Marilyn must decide how to pick up the pieces while heartbreaking little Tiecey almoststeals the show. Undercharacterized Leon is the weak link here. Otherwise, McMillan’s combination of boisterous humor and real compassion, both for the old and the underclass, is deeply impressive.

Into Temptation. Penny Vincenzi. 2005. 538p. Overlook Hardcover. From Publishers Weekly: The third in the Lytton family trilogy (Something Dangerous; No Angel) takes the patrician English clan—and all its jockeying for power, money and approval—into the second half of the 20th century. Set in London and New York, the novel opens in 1953 with the Lyttons in an uproar, as matriarch Celia drops two bombshells: she’s leaving Lytton’s, the family publishing house she has run for decades, and marrying sportsman Lord “Bunny” Arden. (Her husband Oliver died only a year earlier.) Baffled, her children contemplate how these changes will affect their careers and inheritances. Meanwhile, the narrative turns to Barty Miller, Celia’s adopted daughter, who runs Lytton’s New York and controls the majority share of the house thanks to her first husband’s wealth, and Barty’s headstrong daughter, Jenna. Barty also marries again, to Charlie Patterson, a smooth operator of relatively modest means who turns out not to be all that he appears to be. As this page-turner nears its conclusion, the Lytton family fortunes come under threat from the resentful Charlie. Will Barty and Jenna manage to preserve the Lytton legacy? Period color, deliciously shocking revelations and showy characterizations heighten this romance, which should be one of the summer’s guilty pleasures. © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Intruder, The. Storm Jameson. 1956. 235p. MacMillan (UK). The action of the story takes place in ten days in a village in the savage hill-country of Provence, where a small team of archaeologists, led by William Carey, is digging up a Celto-Ligurian city. During this time Nicholas Carey’s hatred for his cousin, who he believes has cheated him in every way since they were children together, reaches a murderous climax. It is a story of obsessions, which work themselves out in a few days of frightful and growing heat. The setting is one of unusual interest, and the persons involved are presented with a shrewd candour.

Invisible Thread. Maree Giles. 2001. 312p. Virago Press Ltd (UK). Fourteen-year-old Ellen Russell runs away from home, from her nagging mother and mean stepfather, and goes and lives with her boyfriend, Robbie. Robbie is mean too, but it’s still more fun than home. Things seem better until Ellen is arrested for running away and, considered to be in “moral danger”, is sentenced to a period in a reform school. Ellen, left by her mother to suffer at the Training School for Girls, soon discovers she is pregnant and for this disgrace the staff make her life even more miserable—her only escape is her dreams and writing poetry. When the baby is born it is taken away against Ellen’s will. Once released from the school Ellen, drawn by the invisIble thread that links a mother to her child, attempts with the help of Frank, a disillusioned doctor, to find the baby she was forced to give up. Instead she uncovers an illegal conspiracy in which babies, taken from people like her (Breeders) are sold to couples wanting to adopt. By the Same Author: The Past is a Secret Country.

Iron Cage. Andre Norton. 1974. 288p. Viking. The People had saved and raised the three children after they were abandoned on the frontier planet. The People, an intelligent race of animals, adopted them into the warm safety of their primitive but happy lives despite their ingrained hatred of humans. And then the Terran scoutship landed, forcing Jony, his brother and sister into the middle of a conflict between their own race, who held their instinctive allegiance, and the People, the only family they ever had.

Island. Jane Rogers. 2000. 260p. Overlook Press. From one of Britain’s best-kept secrets, the novelist whom the Independent said “writes better than almost anyone of her generation,” comes this brooding tale of the murderous ties that bind a mother and daughter. Abandoned at birth and shuttled among foster homes, Nikki Black decides at 28 to seek out her birth mother, intent on killing her. Nikki’s vengeance takes her to a remote island off the coast of Scotland, where both the beaches and the inhabitants are full of artifacts from the past that haunt the present. Here she discovers a witchlike mother who concocts remedies in her dank kitchen and a stuttering, monstrous brother whose seemingly simple mind is filled with stories of past islanders, crofters, and Vikings. Gradually her brother’s dangerous love and strange way of seeing the world transform Nikki’s life in ways that she—and the reader—could never expect. With her signature blend of psychological intensity and strong moral underpinnings, Jane Rogers skillfully leads us into a primal, almost mythic world where our darkest impulses and most profound fears are played out to shocking consequence. Part fairy tale, part murder mystery, Island is, like the madness it depicts, terrifying, logical, and utterly consuming. About the Author: Jane Rogers has written six novels, including the award-winning Mr. Wroe’s Virgins, which was a New York Times Notable Book and was dramatized as a BBC television serial, which aired on the Sundance Channel last winter. Rogers routinely writes for television and radio and teaches at Sheffield Hallam University. She lives in Lancashire, England.

Island Apart, An. Lillian Beckwith. 1994. 166p. St Martin’s Press. Guesthouse cook Kirsty MacLennan gives up her post on the mainland for a marriage proposal that returns her to the islands where she grew up. Kirsty’s suitor, even more laconic than she, is Ruari MacDonald, who’s so taken by her hospitality and good nature, plus her vestigial Gaelic, that he writes her an unsentimental letter of proposal only a few days after they meet. After surveying her prospects, long-orphaned Kirsty wonders mainly whether it’s proper for her to leave her petty employer’s household without giving notice. She doesn’t; in one of the novel’s many small satisfactions, she announces that she’s leaving as her husband (they’ve been quietly married by now) is calling a cab. Ensconced among the austere comforts of Westisle, Kirsty’s baffled by Ruari’s standoffish brother, also named Ruari, whose gruffness extends to ignoring her presence, volunteering not a word to her, and making it clear to his brother that he’s made a mistake in bringing a woman to the desolate island. Even so, Kirsty becomes deeply attached to the place despite her husband’s apparent lack of sexual interest in her (“She had married him for a home and the ring on her finger”), and the growth of her family—with her pregnancy and her informal adoption of Jamie Eilidh, an unwanted, stammering boy with an ethereal singing voice—seems to promise well for her future with Ruari, until a series of disasters (more surprising to Kirsty than to her readers) shows her where her deepest loyalties lie. Beckwith is a past master of the spare, uncondescending simplicity that allows Kirsty to reflect at close of day: “First a new calf had been born, next she had been to a wedding, then her brother-in-law had broken his silence and now she was no longer a virgin.”—Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

It Happened Like This. ASM Hutchinson. 1942. 320p. Duell, Sloan & Pearce. Novel of two orphan boys adopted by their aunt and her ambitious husband. A shadow of intrigue immediately falls across their lives, but at the same time a new source of love and strength. Pictured: 1943 British Edition.

It’s All True: A Novel of Hollywood. David Freeman. 2004. 288p. Simon & Schuster. Henry Wearie is a man with a brilliant future behind him. He arrived in Hollywood barely twenty-one, having escaped from a confusing family and New York University. He got hot fast, selling a big-money script. He was on his way up—though not quite as far up as he had expected. Henry stalled in the middle, then fell from there. As he puts it, “I’ve been hotter and colder than my oven.” It’s All True maps Henry’s odyssey through a tantalizing Los Angeles that he loves and resents, a place where he always feels one phone call, one script, or one break away from the brass ring that circles in and out of his grasp. He marries and divorces and never quite stops yearning for his ex-wife. He spends his days trying to resurrect the life that he let slip away. Then his faltering career gets an unexpected jolt from an old girlfriend who has been promoted into the upper reaches of a studio. She helps Henry, though she extracts a surprising price. When the money had been flowing, Henry bought a Jaguar that has gone from gleaming to dented, a constant reminder of his own fallen state. His life has careened from the glamorous to the quotidian, from erotic adventures on location to slow mornings spent with out-of-work buddies at Hollywood’s venerable Farmers Market. His friends are a motley crew of wiseguy screenwriters, once-popular directors, obscure actors, and famous and highhanded producers and film stars identifiable to most everyone.

Jade Peony, The. Wayson Choy. 1995. 238p. Douglas & McIntyre (Canada). Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and ’40s provides the backdrop for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid reminiscences of the three younger children of an immigrant Chinese family. The siblings grapple with their individual identities in a changing world, wresting autonomy from the strictures of history, family, and poverty. Sister Jook-Liang dreams of becoming Shirley Temple and escaping the rigid, old ways of China. Adopted Second Brother Jung-Sum, struggling with his sexuality and the trauma of his childhood in China, finds his way through boxing. Third Brother Sekky, who never feels comfortable with the multitude of Chinese dialects swirling around him, becomes obsessed with war games, and learns a devastating lesson about what war really means when his 17-year-old babysitter dates a Japanese man. Mingling with life in Canada and the horror of war are the magic, ghosts, and family secrets of Poh-Poh, or Grandmother, who is the heart and pillar of the family. Side by side, her three grandchildren survive hardships and heartbreaks with grit and humor. Like the jade peony of the title, Choy’s storytelling is at once delicate, powerful, and lovely. The Jade Peony was selected by the Literary Review of Canada as one of the “100 Most Important Books in Canadian History” in 2005. It was also an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year in 1998, and was winner of the 1995 Trillium Award (shared with Margaret Atwood). By the Same Author: Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood (1999) and All That Matters (2004).

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Charlotte Brontë. Edited by Currer Bell. 1847. Three Volumes: 304/304/311p. Smith, Elder & Co (London). Early responses to Jane Eyre were mixed. Some held the book to be anti-Christian, others were disturbed by a heroine so proud, self-willed, and essentially unfeminine. The modern reader may well have trouble understanding what all the fuss was about. On the surface a fairly conventional Gothic romance (poor orphan governess is hired by rich, brooding Byronic hero-type), Jane Eyre hardly seems the stuff from which revolutions are made. But the story is very much about the nature of human freedom and equality, and if Jane was seen as something of a renegade in nineteenth-century England, it is because her story is that of a woman who struggles for self-definition and determination in a society that too often denies her that right. But self-determination does not mean untrammeled freedom for men or women. Rochester, that thorny masculine beast whom Jane eventually falls for, is a man who sets his own laws and manipulates the lives of those around him; before he can enter into a marriage of equals with Jane he must undergo a spiritual transformation. Should the lesson sound dry, it’s not. Jane Eyre is full of drama: fires, storms, attempted murder, and a mad wife conveniently stashed away in the attic. This is very sexy stuff—another reason Victorian critics weren’t quite sure what to make of it. — From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Chris Kellett.

Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee. 1989. 244p. Fawcett. “Fates are so intertwined in the modern world, how can a god keep them straight?” At the start of this novel we meet Jane, a twenty-four-year-old woman, pregnant and living on an Iowa farm with an adopted son, Du, a teenager from Southeast Asia. Jane began life as Jyoti, born in a village in India. As a teenage bride, then a teenage widow, she is known as Jasmine. With illegal documents she arrives in Florida with the name Jyoti Vijh; while working as an au pair she is Jace. How did she become all these people? Who is the real person? As the novel moves back and forth in time, Jasmine lives in villages in India, travels aboard a boat overflowing with illegal immigrants, and resides in apartments in New York City. Now in Iowa, Jane introduces Indian foods to the local people and heats leftovers in the microwave. Some of the lands Jasmine inhabits are familiar, but, through her eyes, they seem new. Jasmine is ultimately a tale of identity, loss, courage, and hope. “Jyoti of Hasnapur was not Jasmine...that Jasmine isn’t this Jane Ripplemeyer...And which of us is the undetected murderer of a half-faced monster, which of us held a dying husband, which of us was raped and raped and raped in boats and cars and motel rooms?” Bharati Mukherjee invites the reader in to explore and learn with them all.—From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith. By the Same Author: Leave It To Me.

Jeremy Thrane. Kate Christensen. 2001. 320p. Broadway Books. From the author of the highly acclaimed In the Drink, a smart and sexy exploration of New York and its customs through the eyes of a disillusioned, yet secretly hopeful, gay man. Jeremy Thrane is a 35-year-old writer in love with a married man. For years, Jeremy has posed as “archivist” to Ted Masterson, a Hollywood action star. Jeremy maintains Ted’s New York brownstone and guards the secret that could destroy his career. But when Ted and his movie-star wife, Giselle, adopt a child and become America’s most-photographed family, Jeremy finds himself without a job and, more importantly, bereft of the love of his life. With the same wit and authenticity that have made her a critical and popular favorite, Kate Christensen chronicles Jeremy’s search for a new start as he ventures to every corner of the New York landscape, from watering holes where gossip columnists await an “item” to dives where waiters and busboys are eager to please patrons–especially after their shifts are over. In his spare time, he struggles to finish a novel based on his father’s peripatetic life as a fanatical Marxist and turns out sizzling pornography for a one-man enterprise run by an old high school acquaintance. His sister, an up-and-coming rock musician, and his thrice-married, former flower-child mother, who found her true calling as a poet late in life, provide the mixture of criticism and compassion Jeremy has known all his life and now, for the most unexpected reasons, finally learns to appreciate. A fast-paced and funny social satire, Jeremy Thrane deftly captures the slippery chameleon quality of American identity, the power ofyouth and beauty, and the complexity of love. By the Same Author: Trouble (2009).

Jonathan Found. Cecil Maiden. 1957. 214p. Thomas Y Crowell. When Jonathan’s real father and mother were murdered by Chinese terrorists, he fled with an old servant to Hong Kong, where he was adopted by a wealthy American businessman and his wife. However, his new mother is determined to turn Jonathan into the “image and likeness” of the child she lost in a tragic accident. The father accepts him for who he is, and Jonathan clings to his own identity. The story is told through the eyes of 7-year-old Jonny, and is his story, as well as the story of all adopted children.

Journey of Hope. Shannon Bernard. 2007. 188p. AuthorHouse. Emma Williams travels to China in a quest to find her biological family and explore her heritage. Upon arriving, she is quickly thrust into an adventure of mistaken identities, mysterious strangers, orphaned baby girls, and a cat and mouse game with the police who relentlessly pursue her. Emma soon discovers that her only hope of survival is in the hands of an attractive young man who unexpectedly befriends her. In the end, her life will depend on whether she can discern the real reason he is helping her. Throughout her perilous journey, Emma’s relationship with God is tested as she learns a valuable lesson about putting her trust in the only One who really matters. About the Author: Shannon Bernard lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and three children. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in English Education from West Chester University, graduating Summa Cum Laude. She is currently teaching English in her hometown. Mrs. Bernard has been on several missionary trips to Kenya, East Africa. She lectures about these trips at churches, bible conferences, schools, and community organizations, raising awareness of the needs of the Maasai. In addition to Africa, Mrs. Bernard has broadened her multi-cultural understanding through travel to Europe and the Middle East. Although she has never traveled to China, Mrs. Bernard has two nieces who were adopted from China. One of her nieces, Emma, inspired her to write Journey of Hope.

Joy & Josephine. Monica Dickens. 1948. 320p. Michael Joseph. With the author’s inimitable humour and sympathy, she tells the story of a girl of obscure background adopted from an orphanage.

Jubel’s Children. Lenard Kaufman. 1950. 280p. Random House. The age-old problem of the responsibilities of children toward their parents is the theme of Lenard Kaufman’s third novel in a series about the Watson Family. This theme, with new and subtle variations, becomes more than a commentary on a familiar tragedy; it brings new insight into the changing relationships of the modern family. Jubel Watson is a recent widower whose four grown children—two sons and two daughters—face the prospect of caring for their father for the rest of his life. Each dreads the assumption of this new burden and tries to evade it by passing it on to the other, and none takes into account the independence or resourcefulness of their father.

Juniper Tree, The. Barbara Comyns (1909-1992). 1985. 187p. Methuen & Co. Ltd (UK). Bella Winter, the narrator of Comyns’ Gothic novel, which is based on the Grimm brothers’ tale of the same name, has scars, both mental (derived from her dysfuntional relationship with her mother) and physical (an automobile accident has left her with a long scar on one side of her face). Conceived out of wedlock, she, too, has a daughter, Tommy (also called Marline), who is the product of a one-night stand with a young black man at a party, and so both mother and daughter suffer the social stigma of their respective physical differences: Tommy because she is “half-caste” and Bella because of her facial scar. Emotionally vulnerable and highly sensitive, and craving love, her vulnerabilities are exploited by Bernard and Gertrude Forbes, a charming, urbane and happily married couple who live in a Georgian house in Richmond. Althogh well off, the Forbeses long for a child of their own, and Bella is delighted when Gertrude becomes pregnant and develops the habit of eating the blue berries from the Juniper tree in the Richmond garden, which is inhabited by a pair of noisy magpies. Bella’s self-confidence is restored by the warm affection and praise of the Forbses’ and living above a small antique shop in Twickenham, she happily awaits, with Gertrude, the birth of the baby. Gertrude, however, tragically dies in childbirth and pursuant to her request, Bella cares for her child and is drawn into helping Bernard run the Richmond house. Bernard suggests that Bella give up her job and flat and move into the Richmond house permanently in order to look after his child, Johnny. Bella finally agrees, and moves in, bringing with her a large oak chest, among her other possessions. After honeymooning in Madrid, the couple returns to the Richmond house, which, like Manderley in Danphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, seems haunted by Gertrude, a feeling which is not helped by the fact that some of her things have been preserved exactly where she left them. Bernard gradually loses interest in his new wife, and takes up with another young woman. Eventually, tragedy strikes again when Johnny is killed when he climbs into Bella’s oak chest, now sitting in Bella’s basement room, and his neck is broken when the lid falls down upon him. Wracked with guilt for her perceived part in the child’s death, and thereby unwilling to report it, Bella buries him beneath the Juniper tree in the garden, explaining to Bernard that he was taken on a trip by his German aunt, Charlotte, as a birthday present. Her subsequent suicide attempt is folied by the arrival of policemen invesitaging the theft by one of the magpies of a gold chain from the hand of a local jeweller as he stood in the street. Believing they are there to arres her, Bella suffers a mental breakdown. Thereafter, Bernard becomes more distant and after Bella’s mother steps in to care for her granddaughter, bella’s relationship with her mother improves. The novel ends with Bella moving into a large house with her mother and daughter and marrying Peter, a man whom Bernard employed as a picture-framer.

Karoo. Steve Tesich. 1998. 416p. Harcourt Brace. There are far more tragicomic possibilities in the lives of gracelessly aging men than one might suspect, and the list of writers who have taken advantage of them is small but fertile—Mordecai Richler, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow among them. The late Steve Tesich, best known for his original screenplay for Breaking Away, joins this august group with the tale of Saul Karoo, a wealthy, alcoholic Hollywood script doctor plagued by exactly the kind of banal problems that he has ruthlessly edited out of the scripts of others—most notably a fear of intimacy. He meets regularly with his estranged wife Dianah to discuss the academic question of their ever-impending divorce and celebrate the anniversary of their separation. “Tender, deeply felt, full of love, that’s the kind of divorce we had in mind... The more we talked about divorce, the more married we seemed.” His adopted teenage son, Billy, keeps pushing for more dedicated father-son contact, to Karoo’s great discomfort: “I loved Billy, but I was absolutely incapable of loving him in private where it was just the two of us. That was another disease I had... Evasion of privacy. Evasion at all cost of privacy of any kind. With anyone.” A doctor tells Karoo that he’s shrinking vertically and swelling horizontally, as if to push the world even further away. But when he signs on to re-cut the last film of dying directorial great Arthur Houseman, he discovers Leila, Billy’s natural mother, playing a bit part in the film, and from that moment he’s transformed. In a bizarre twist, the unbelievable melodrama that follows from his attempt to engineer happiness from this coincidence is the stuff of a blockbuster script—offered to him, naturally, for the writing. Karoo is bitter and cynical to the core, but the somewhat heavy-handed ending embraces the possibility of redemption even as it delivers the final insult to its unhappy hero.

Kate Vaiden. Reynolds Price. 1986. 306p. Atheneum. Familial dysfunction defines this Price effort—his first experiment with a first-person narrator in a full-length novel. Kate Vaiden is left parentless as a child when her father fatally shoots her mother and then himself. As an adult, Kate attests, “I’d caused their deaths.” She isn’t the only one in such a predicament: her mother’s mother died in childbirth, and the father of her child was raised an orphan. Trapped in a self-defeating cycle, Kate forever seeks stability, only to flee when it gravitates within her reach. This rich Southern tale, which won a National Book Critics Award in 1986, is slathered with Christian themes of guilt, salvation, shame and, occasionally, triumph.

Kennison’s Gifts. W David Tibbs. 2009. 404p. iUniverse, Inc. Ken Kennison is not his real name. His drug-addicted parents sell him to an unscrupulous lawyer while he is still an infant. But cruel fate intervenes, and Kenny spends the next seventeen years of his life being shuffled from one foster home to the next. With every new home and family, Kenny seeks the care and love that every child needs-and that most take for granted. But instead, he receives only variations of physical and mental abuse. Teen-aged Kenny finds a journal, and as he travels in search of his past, he records his observations, mostly in poetic prose. Despite his troubled childhood, Kenny remains a good person, and at the end of his life, he is granted a special gift. Years later, Will Healy, a successful young author, learns of Kenny’s gift and how it has dramatically changed his life. But the best is yet to come.

Kill Hole. Jamake Highwater. 1992. 214p. Grove/Atlantic. Sitko Ghost Horse escapes from the dying city into the desert, where he encounters the dreamworld of a tribe that seems to be from another time and place. He is initiated into a ritual that requires him to verify his identity. He finds he cannot do so. Shifting between two levels of awareness, between a surreal prisoner state within the tribe and his quotidian urban existence, Sitko relives his past—a violent childhood, separation from his parents, and adoption into a white family; his controversial success as a painter and divided role in often conflicting communities; and his relationship with a novelist, the son of a German mother and a black GI. Kill Hole is a deeply imagined work that takes as its landscape that flashpoint where barriers are crossed and cultures interact. It follows one man’s spiritual quest for wholeness and fulfillment in a world where the spectre of death is a perpetual pressure among the living. Written in darkly radiant, singing prose of unsual purity and rich in both modern literary allusion and Native American folklore, it has the resonance of myth, the power of legend, and the magic of incantation.

King is Dead, The. Jim Lewis. 2003. 272p. Knopf. A father’s shame is explored by his son in The King Is Dead, the third novel by Jim Lewis. Walter Selby, a decorated WW II veteran, becomes a speech writer and strategist for a prominent Tennessee politician; marries Nicole, a decade younger; and lives with all the trappings of the Southern upper-middle class, including two small children, Frank and Gail. A political debacle causes the fiercely moral Walter to resign, and he returns home early, only to find Nicole has been unfaithful. The second half of the novel follows Frank—who recalls little of his parents after his adoption—as a known, but declining, actor approached by a famous actress, Lenore, to star in her swan song. Lewis displays considerable writing talent, such as when Frank explains to Lenore that he never talks about his real father, and “[s]he sounded surprised by the notion, and slightly incredulous, as if he’d told her that he’d never tasted orange juice, or that he’d once gone a year without sleeping.” The novel is constructed to showcase Lewis’s astute musings on love, sex, and death, but gives short shrift to the relationship between Frank and his ancestry. Instead, Frank’s time is spent recalling his first love, Kimmie, and their sexual experiences (in vivid detail). While engaging characters abound, the plot of The King Is Dead becomes suppressed and merely strings them along. — Michael Ferch

King of the World, The. Merrill Joan Gerber. 1989. 276p. Pushcart Press. Lusting for control, Michael abuses Ginny and their adopted baby while claiming to love them, and squanders the family goods on get-rich schemes.

Kinship Theory: A Novel. Hester Kaplan. 2001. 277p. Little Brown & Co. Kinship Theory, the debut novel by award-winning short storywriter, Hester Kaplan, explores the nature of desire, the bonds of family, and the possibilities and passions of parenthood. Maggie Crown, 47 agrees to bear a child for her infertile daughter, Dale. Soon after, she beings to question her decision, her choices in life, and herself as a good mother. Kaplan limns the emotional landscape of these ordinary people in their extraordinary circumstances, creating characters as real as they are compelling. About the Author: Hester Kaplan is the author of the award-winning story collection The Edge of Marriage.

Kite: A Novel. Ed Minus. 1985. Viking. This is the author’s first novel.  Set in South Carolina the late 1950s, it evokes the landscape of adolescence and the feel of a place and a time with a rare grasp of authority. When fourteen-year-old Kite Cummings steps off the bus in the rural town of Lenfied, South Carolina, his world opens up into a summer idyll. Adopted by an aunt and uncle he has scarcely known before, he discovers, with a palpable sense of pleasure and freedom, the warmth and security of a real home, a friend down the road, a pretty girl to fall in love with, and the fields, woods, orchards, and rivers of the piedmont countryside. But Kite has not left the Baptist orphanage entirely behind, and there are shadows in this sunlit world. His innocence is strained by an urgent lust and haunted by an almost ghostly black man; adult experience looms as a mystery both desirable and threatening; morality and responsibility begin to press down. Kite’s effort to find his own path through the darker realities of life leads finally, shockingly and inevitably, to a fateful decision.