Lady, The. Conrad Richter. 1957. 191p. Knopf. Set in early twentieth-century New Mexico, the story is set around Doña Ellen, the lady of the title, who is a great beauty, born to wealth and position. She wields her power, drawing all into the silken web of her artiocratic charm, but clashing with Snell Beasley, a man of money, who is forceful, coldly ambitious, and a master of legal intrigue.

Lake, The: A Novel. Daniel Villasenor. 2000. 336p. Viking Press. Enormously impressive first fiction from poet and blacksmith Villasenor, who traces the trajectory of a despondent philosopher from the nuthouse to a place he can finally call home. To reach that place, however, Zachary Brannagan first must bring tragedy into the lives of those who care most about him. Though he was once a promising young scholar, Zach’s cloistered, studious life has been in ruins since the night he lay down to sleep in the middle of a road outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Institutionalized, he befriends an elderly psychiatrist, who loans him the money to travel in search of his natural parents, somewhere on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. But ill fortune strikes Zach in New Orleans: his money stolen, he lives on the street until taken to a Catholic shelter, where on his first night he’s assaulted and sliced with a razor. Fleeing blindly, he finds his way by chance to The Lake, a backwoods haven for maimed and afflicted children run by the supremely capable Anna, who seems to need nothing other than the company of her charges. At this refuge Zach begins to heal physically and spiritually, in the process making friends with the shelter’s most special child, Samuel, a redheaded epileptic who doesn’t speak but nonetheless communicates eloquently. Though he’s grown close to Anna as well, Zach tears himself away to resume his journey, taking Samuel with him. They find disaster on the road soon enough, and the shock of it brings Zach at last to an understanding of what truly matters. As the story unfolds, this already engrossing drama of sadness and redemption is elevated to an even higher level by the author’s poetic sensibility, which conveys to the most ordinary things a rare luster and warmth that recast the whole of reality in the shimmering, singing colors of a rainbow. — © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Laments, The: A Novel. George Hagen. 2004. 384p. Random House. From Publishers Weekly: Ever in search of greener pastures, idealistic but frustrated engineer Howard Lament drags his long-suffering wife, Julia, and their three sons from South Africa to Rhodesia, Bahrain, England and America. The family’s rootlessness weighs most heavily on eldest son Will, secretly adopted after a maternity ward mixup goes horribly awry, who feels the odd man out in the face of his constantly changing surroundings and the preternatural solidarity of his twin brothers. Hagen, a screenwriter and first-time novelist, makes the story a coming-of-age saga and familial drama, often comic in tone but also full of tragedy: car crashes, a kidnapping, death and dismemberment. As the Laments give up their privileged status under apartheid and eventually settle for downward mobility in the crass American suburbs, Hagan makes their wanderings and expatriate identity crises a commentary on the vexed legacy of British colonialism. The narrative sometimes slows to allow the Laments to hash out their liberal politics, and some sketchily drawn characters (Lament’s son Julius is memorable largely for his un-self-conscious masturbatory rituals) die when their plot assignments are completed. Hagen pokes fun at Albion’s seed with comic clichés-the Rhodesians are racist Colonel Blimps, the English are soccer thugs, the Americans are conformists, religious zealots or strident New Leftists. The Laments themselves, saddled with the melancholy of postimperial decline, are a spirited but slightly sad lot who wish for better lives. This is a funny, touching novel about the meaning of family, with an oddly high body count. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Land of Echos. Daniel Hecht. 2004. 400p. Bloomsbury Publishing. Tommy Keeday is a talented student at a boarding school for gifted Navajo teens, located in the vast high desert of western New Mexico. When he is suddenly seized by an illness with bizarre and frightening symptoms, his family believes he is possessed by a chindi, the hostile spirit of a dead ancestor. But Julieta McCarty, the principal of Oak Springs School, is unwilling to accept either a traditional Navajo explanation or a conventional medical diagnosis. In desperation, she calls on Seattle-based parapsychologist Cree Black. Nothing in Cree’s training as a clinical psychologist or her experience as a paranormal investigator has prepared her for the dangerous task of helping this brilliant boy in whom two spirits seem to battle. Is Tommy Keeday just a sensitive but troubled teenager, or is he suffering from an exotic brain disorder? Or is there truth in the terrifying Navajo legends of witches, skinwalkers, and malevolent ghosts? As Cree and her associates struggle to find the answer, it becomes apparent that there are secrets in the pasts of Tommy and the people around him, and that his fate can only be decided by exposing these unresolved longings and regrets.

Last Bridge, The. Teri Coyne. 2009. 240p. Ballantine Books. For ten years, Alexandra “Cat” Rucker has been on the run from her past. With an endless supply of bourbon and a series of meaningless jobs, Cat is struggling to forget her Ohio hometown and the rural farmhouse she once called home. But a sudden call from an old neighbor forces Cat to return to the home and family she never intended to see again. It seems that Cat’s mother is dead. What Cat finds at the old farmhouse is disturbing and confusing: a suicide note, written on lilac stationery and neatly sealed in a ziplock bag, that reads: Cat, He isn’t who you think he is. Mom xxxooo One note, ten words—one for every year she has been gone—completely turns Cat’s world upside down. Seeking to unravel the mystery of her mother’s death, Cat must confront her past to discover who “he” might be: her tyrannical, abusive father, now in a coma after suffering a stroke? Her brother, Jared, named after her mother’s true love (who is also her father’s best friend)? The town coroner, Andrew Reilly, who seems to have known Cat’s mother long before she landed on a slab in his morgue? Or Addison Watkins, Cat’s first and only love? The closer Cat gets to the truth, the harder it is for her to repress the memory and the impact of the events that sent her away so many years ago. About the Author: Teri Coyne is an alumna of New York University. In addition to writing fiction, Coyne wrote and performed stand-up comedy for many years. The Last Bridge is her first novel. She divides her time between New York City and the North Fork of Long Island.

Last Colony, The. John Scalzi. 2007. 320p. Tor Books. From Publishers Weekly: Full of whodunit twists and explosive action, Scalzi’s third SF novel lacks the galactic intensity of its two related predecessors, but makes up for it with entertaining storytelling on a very human scale. Several years after the events of The Ghost Brigades (2006), John Perry, the hero of Old Man’s War (2005), and Jane Sagan are leading a normal life as administrator and constable on the colonial planet Huckleberry with their adopted daughter, Zoë, when they get conscripted to run a new colony, ominously named Roanoke. When the colonists are dropped onto a different planet than the one they expected, they find themselves caught in a confrontation between the human Colonial Union and the alien confederation called the Conclave. Hugo-finalist Scalzi avoids political allegory, promoting individual compassion and honesty and downplaying patriotic loyalty—except in the case of the inscrutable Obin, hive-mind aliens whose devotion to Zoë will remind fans of the benevolent role Captain Nemo plays in Verne’s Mysterious Island. Some readers may find the deus ex machina element a tad heavy-handed, but it helps keep up the momentum. © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author: John Scalzi won the 2006 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and his debut novel Old Man’s War was a finalist for the Hugo Award. His other novels include The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, and The Android’s Dream. He lives in southern Ohio with his wife and daughter.

Last Lullaby. Denise Hamilton. 2004. 368p. Scribner. Los Angeles Times reporter Eve Diamond has spent the day at LAX, shadowing U.S. Customs Supervisor William Maxwell. He’s got his eye on an incoming flight from Beijing via Seoul and Tokyo. The flight’s packed with the usual mass of humanity, ranging from the elegant Asian woman in the raspberry silk pantsuit who emerges from first class carrying a tired toddler to the scruffy students who have spent the long flight in economy. Suddenly, shots ring out. Three people are dead, including two men who appear to be businessmen and the silk-clad woman. The man who was booked on the flight as the dead woman’s husband is missing. And the sad little toddler is left behind. Who is this child? Her passport says she’s Japanese, but she doesn’t seem to understand the language. Was the dead woman really her mother? Why has the child made five transpacific flights in one year? And why does the INS whisk her immediately into hiding? Is this child a pawn in a larger scheme? Why would criminals care about this little girl? And why is Eve, too, in danger? Eve knows she must try to find the answers. Her search takes her into L.A.’s sleazy hotels, cyber-cafes, and into the upscale milieu of trendy restaurants and high-powered human rights lawyers. Nothing is quite what it appears to be, and nobody seems to want Eve to find the child.

Last Town on Earth, The. Thomas Mullen. 2006. 416p. Random House. Set against the backdrop of one of the most virulent epidemics that America ever experienced—the 1918 flu epidemic—Thomas Mullen’s powerful, sweeping first novel is a tale of morality in a time of upheaval. Deep in the mist-shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest is a small mill town called Commonwealth, conceived as a haven for workers weary of exploitation. For Philip Worthy, the adopted son of the town’s founder, it is a haven in another sense—as the first place in his life he’s had a loving family to call his own. And yet, the ideals that define this outpost are being threatened from all sides. A world war is raging, and with the fear of spies rampant, the loyalty of all Americans is coming under scrutiny. Meanwhile, another shadow has fallen across the region in the form of a deadly illness striking down vast swaths of surrounding communities. When Commonwealth votes to quarantine itself against contagion, guards are posted at the single road leading in and out of town, and Philip Worthy is among them. He will be unlucky enough to be on duty when a cold, hungry, tired—and apparently ill—soldier presents himself at the town’s doorstep begging for sanctuary. The encounter that ensues, and the shots that are fired, will have deafening reverberations throughout Commonwealth, escalating until every human value—love, patriotism, community, family, friendship—not to mention the town’s very survival, is imperiled. Inspired by a little-known historical footnote regarding towns that quarantined themselves during the 1918 epidemic, The Last Town on Earth is a remarkably moving and accomplished debut. About the Author: Thomas Mullen was born in Rhode Island and lives in Washington, DC, with his wife. He is at work on a new novel.

Latitudes of Love. Thomas Doremus. 1961. 157p. Andre Deutsch Ltd (UK). Hector, the narrator of the story, is “adopted” by Bill and Mary, who can keep him in the circumstances to which he feels he should become accustomed. Mary’s company he enjoys; Bill he despises slightly to begin with—but it is towards Bill that he is gradually drawn. The relationship develops, through ambiguity, into love. The author deals with homosexuality in a way whch makes most other writers’ attitudes toward it seem sententious, self-conscious or fussy. Witty and at ease, he makes no concessions towards prudery or sentimantality. Remarkable for 1961.

Lazarus Project, The: A Novel. John Bayer. 1999. 320p. Broadman & Holman Publishers. A deserted airstrip and a forced landing give a young stowaway the chance she needs to escape her captors. When David Michaels and instructor Dean Barber discover fourteen-year-old Gaby Ibarra in the cargo of their plane, she’s in no physical condition to tell them why or from whom she is running. Gaby is a crucial link in what authorities will eventually discover is an illegal adoption ring. She’s also center stage in author John Bayer’s The Lazarus Project, along with retired Navy chaplain Michaels who begins to unravel a mystery that began in 1944, just after D-Day. As Michael discovers, a Nazi concentration camp doctor—code named Lazarus—resides in the U.S. and with the help of Die Gruppe, a network of powerful political and corporate supporters, is carrying out a mission of manufacturing “made to order” babies for the wealthy. There’s a more sinister twist, however, when Lazarus’s true identity is revealed, as is his plan for creating the “perfect” race. More than a bone-chilling mystery, The Lazarus Project houses a multi-faceted cast of characters from Dean Barber, who learns that God knows and loves him, to David’s fiancé Cindy Tolbert, who learns firsthand the power of prayer and the providence of God as each becomes the target of Die Gruppe. Bayer is also the author of Necessary Risk. He is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and the Arkansas National Guard and has served as a missionary in the Republic of Panama and Mexico.

Leave It to Me. Bharati Mukherjee. 1997. 288p. Alfred A Knopf. Debby DiMartino grows up in a middle-class, Italian-American family in Schenectady, NY, yet she is “a tall girl in a small school, a beautiful girl in a plain family, an exotic girl in a very American town.” Debby is adopted, abandoned as a baby by her American hippie mother and Eurasian father in India, where she was placed in a Catholic orphanage until the DiMartinos took her in. Growing up, Debby identifies herself by what she is not; at age 23, after a brief, disastrous love affair with a Hong Kong ex-movie star, she decides to find out what she is. Debby’s search for her birth parents takes her to San Francisco, where she lifts a new name off a vanity license plate and begins a new life as Devi Dee. Along with her old identity, Debby/Devi sheds her old conventions, becoming a “Tenderloin prowler, all allure and strength and zero innocence” as she lives out of her car in Haight Ashbury, befriends the crazy, the strung-out, and the paranoid who populate its streets, and begins her hunt for the woman who gave her life—a search that will lead Devi into an apocalyptic confrontation with a most unexpected demon. In Leave It to Me, Bharati Mukherjee has created a hip, violent, and darkly funny look at what it means to be an American at the end of the 20th century. By the Same Author: Jasmine.

Leaving Alva. Victoria Lipman. 1998. 208p. Simon & Schuster. A muddled debut novel, on the trials and tribulations of self-exploration, that fails to ignite the reader’s sympathy for its wooden protagonist. Thirty-year-old Chloe begins her story by leaving Alva. She admits there’s nothing really wrong with her husband (except that he stares at her too much), though she can no longer bear the monotony of their less-than-romantic routine. Taking a suitcase, a knapsack, and a thousand dollars in cash, she buys a one-way bus ticket to Arizona, hoping the desert sun will brighten her life. On board she meets Zena, an energetic free spirit who attempts to alter Chloe’s diminished self-perception. Spontaneous Zena invites Chloe to stay with her beloved Aunt Ethel, whom she’s visiting in Phoenix. Aunt Ethel welcomes Chloe into her home, intrigued by her status as an outcast (Ethel herself is a bit of a misfit, being dangerously obese). Still, all this love and affection do little to brighten Chloe’s dour temperament; the scars of the past, it seems, have cut too deep. In flashback chapters, Chloe relates her lonely childhood: her mother leaving, her brother and sister being put up for adoption, her father dragging her around the country from one job to another, ultimately leaving her with an aunt. Haunted by these memories, Chloe hits the road again, this time hitchhiking to Los Angeles. Though her motivation for this (and most everything else in her narrative) is unclear, she feels restored enough by the uneventful experience to return permanently to Ethel, who happily plays the role of mother/therapist. Meanwhile, the narrator’s shadowy objectives and even more puzzling behavior (a grown woman with a thousand dollars behaving like a dull-witted teenage runaway?) make for such a seemingly aimless story that the reader longs to travel back to New York City with Zena, who promises a much more compelling life. An unappealing protagonist and uncertain motives add up to a disappointing debut. — From Kirkus Reviews. Copyright © 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Legacy of Cain, The. Wilkie Collins (1824-1889). 1888. Chatto & Wundus (UK). A Congregational minister, the Rev. Gracedieu, performs an impulsive act of charity, adopting the soon-to-be-orphaned infant daughter of a condemned murderess on the eve of execution, although warned that the mother’s taint might manifest someday in the child. Shortly afterwards, his previously childless wife gives birth to a daughter of their own and, without his knowledge, conceives the cold-hearted plan of ousting the cuckoo from her nest. Only the Governor of the prison is aware of the lady’s perfidy, but when she dies before gaining her ends he holds his peace and allows her doting husband to continue idolizing the wife’s sainted memory. Gracedieu retires to a town where his circumstances are unknown and even-handedly brings up both girls, Eunice and Helena, as his own. Both are imbued with the highest principles and a strict education eschewing such corrupting influences as French novels, newspapers, and the theater. To ensure that the adopted child’s dubious history is never disclosed, the minister refuses to reveal even to his daughters who is the eldest and where they were born. Eunice, sweet and ingenuous, has fallen in love with a young man she met on a visit to London, the rich and handsome Philip Dunboyne, but when Philip visits the provincial town where she lives to ask Gracedieu for her hand in marriage he is ensnared by the physical charms of the other sister, Helena, who proceeds to rob Eunice of her fiancé. Gracedieu refuses to countenance a marriage with Eunice, while Philip’s father threatens to disinherit him if he marries Helena. Philip dithers between the two until Helena has seduced him and Eunice has rejected him, upon which his wandering eye returns to his first choice. Gracedieu’s clumsy, but well-meaning cousin Selina, her mysterious friend Mrs Tenbruggen, and the nameless Governor interfere in the interests of one party or the other. Meanwhile, since no Collins novel can do without a crime, one of the rival sisters attempts to poison Philip, but is foiled by the vigilance of the Doctor called in to treat Gracedieu’s typical Victorian complaint (a “nervous disorder” requiring rest and foreign travel, followed by “brain disease” because he wouldn’t go). Collins recklessly tosses in a supernatural visitation to muddy the waters still more: the dead murderess’ spirit seems to haunt her daughter in a dream, tempting her to commit murder herself, and in another scene briefly “possesses” her. Nothing approaching a rational explanation is offered. The Legacy of Cain finally shakes the dirt off its skirts and metes out joy to nearly all concerned. Even the wicked sister eventually lands on her feet. In the merry mood of the last chapter, it’s a pity that Collins sees fit to jerk some tears by consigning poor Rev. Gracedieu to senile dementia and the elder Dunboyne to the grave just to spare them the shock of revelations everyone else takes in stride and squelch all possible objections to the happy-end wedding.

Let the Lion Eat Straw. Ellease Southerland. 1979. 181p. Scribner. Tells the story of Abeba Williams, whose mother abandons the poverty and despair of the South—and in the process her daughter—for opportunities up North. In the absence of her mother, Abeba clings to Mamma Habblesham, a woman with enviable reserves of love and hope. Their affection for each other seems boundless—until Abeba’s mother returns to take her daughter to Brooklyn. As she grows up, her exceptional musical talent promises to be an avenue of escape. But a handsome young singer distracts her, and opportunities that once seemed so close begin to fall away. Now married with children, Abeba fights to maintain the dignity of her family.

Letter, The. Richard Paul Evans. 1997. 240p. Simon & Schuster. “The Christmas Box” phenomenon continues. On a late winter’s night, six years after the death of Mary Anne and David Parkin’s young daughter, Mary Anne makes her pilgrimage to the angel statue where she discovers a mysterious letter. After she shows it to David, he knows in his heart that it is from his mother who abandoned him long ago. When David sets out to find her, he begins a journey of healing and self-discovery while facing another tragic loss. Sequel to The Christmas Box (1995) & The Timepiece (1996).

Letters to Montgomery Clift. Noël Alumit. 2002. 244p. MacAdam/Cage Publishing. From Publishers Weekly: This occasionally radiant coming-of-age tale crams human rights violations, the cultural and emotional turmoil of immigrant life, self-mutilation, family ties, abortion, coming out and the ubiquitous search for self all into a brisk, sometimes jarring read. In the midst of the atrocities of the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1970s, eight-year-old Bong Bong Luwad is smuggled to Los Angeles, where he stays with his abusive, alcoholic Auntie Yuna, who writes “letters to God and dead relatives.” Each chapter begins with missives to the eponymous dead movie star who catches Bong’s imagination, filling in for his missing parents and rousing his burgeoning sexuality. Bounced around the foster care system after Auntie Yuna goes to the liquor store and never returns, Bong ends up with a well-to-do foster family, the Filipino Arangans, who are picture-perfect on the outside, but harbor their own mysteries, disillusionments and shames, one of which drives Bong away from them. He finds a confidante in their rebellious daughter, Amada, and a range of opportunities provided by their wealth, but he connects with Amnesty International and holds on to the hope that his parents are still alive. The obsessive letters are a rather clumsy expository device and the ending is less than credible, but Alumit’s debut is affecting enough to suggest that when he hits his stride, he will be a writer to reckon with. © Cahners Business Information, Inc.

U.S. First Edition

Levkas Man. Hammond Innes. 1971. 320p. Collins (UK). The strange love-hate relationship between a young man and the anthropologist who adopted him starts in Amsterdam, moves to Malta and the isles of Greece. Their aim is to pursue the origins of early mankind, but as the young man uncovers his father’s past he begins to understand his own restless nature. About the Author: Highly successful novelist of 35 books, Innes was a born story-teller. He continued the great tradition of well-crafted adventure stories, exemplified in the books John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard, but added to his work a strong personal narrative voice, a feeling of real experience, and his love of untamed nature, especially the sea. Innes’s hobbies, travel and ocean racing, also reflected in his plots. Innes’s knowledge of the sea and ships, and his own experiences as a seaman, provided material for his books.The central theme in Innes’s work is man against the forces of nature. The familiar elements of a Hammond Innes book are daring escapes, cliffhanging situations, and overpowering forces of nature. He usually spent six months traveling, examining new settings for his novels, and six months writing. In the 1960s Innes started to spend more time with the background work of his novels and slowed down his publishing speed. He traveled into many parts of the world to ensure the authenticity in his works. He pondered ecological questions in some of his books and began to purchase land from Suffolk, Wales, and Australia, in order to protect nature and plant trees. Innes was awarded a C.B.E. (Commander, Order of the British Empire) in 1978 and received the Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement award in 1993. Innes’s books have been praised by Dorothy B. Hughes, V.S. Pritchett, L.A.G. Strong, Howard Spring, Daphne du Maurier, John Barkham, S.P.B. Mais, Eric Ambler [among many others]. for being suspenseful, well-documented, well-written thrillers.

Life Blood. Thomas Hoover. 2000. 351p. Pinnacle. Morgan James, a filmmaker, is unable to have a baby so she decides to do a short film on people who adopt. She finds that the process is long, drawn-out and tedious, but then she hears of some women who recieved healthy, white babies in just a few months. She sets out to investigate the adoption agency and from there it is as if Hoover followed a formula for bizzare human experiment novels. There is the obiligatory vague person wandering around the doctors complex, the mysterious doctor who travels back forth between Central America and New York and Morgan, who upon discovering that her cousin is in the clutches of this madman, immediately goes to South America to resuce her, even though she has no proof that that is where her cousin is. It is so predictable that you can almost finish writing it for him after a certain point in the book. Some of the things that he has his characters doing are so stupid you want to slap them. This would make a great emergency book, you know the one that you keep in your glovebox in case you have a flat tire and are waiting for help. — Kathleene Thomason

Life Interrupted, A. Michael P Langelaan. 2003. 212p. Trafford Publishing Co (Canada). Michael Langelaan’s first book, A Life Interrupted explores the sometimes-stormy relationship between parents and their children. It is the story of Alex Fray, a troubled man who had been given up at birth by his biological parents. It would be an understatement to say that there were challenges during Alex’s early years, which include two sets of adoptive parents, encounters with the law, experimentation with drugs, and poor school grades; however, the author cleverly utilizes the character’s foibles and inadequacies to form the basis for a compelling tale of courage and determination. Alex is faced with emotional and physical obstacles in his quest to find the love and acceptance he so desperately seeks, but his journey eventually leads him home, culminating in a bizarre twist of fate that reveals his true identity. A Life Interrupted underscores the impact that parents’ words and behaviour have on their children’s lives, and demonstrates how some parental decisions can lead to dire consequences. Please visit home.cogeco.ca/~imaginecreations/ for more information. About the Author: Michael P. Langelaan was born January 15, 1969, and raised in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. After graduating, he enlisted in the Canadian Air force and served three years in Saskatchewan. He has two nine year old children and now resides back in his home town with his girlfriend Kelley. Using his creative skills, he has completed his first novel and is currently working on his next script.

Like Dandelion Dust. Karen Kingsbury. 2006. 384p. Center Street. Jack and Molly Campbell enjoyed an idyllic life in their small hometown outside Atlanta with their adopted 4-year-old, Joey. Then they receive the phone call that shatters their world: a social worker delivers the news that Joey’s biological father has been released from prison and is ready to start life over—but with his son. When a judge rules that Joey must be returned to his father, the Campbells, in a silent haze of grief and utter disbelief, watch their son pick a dandelion and blow the feathery seeds into the wind. Struggling with the dilemma of following the law, their hearts, and what they know to be morally right, the Campbells find that desperation leads to dangerous thoughts. What if they can devise a plan? Take Joey and simply disappear ... like dandelion dust. About the Author: Karen Kingsbury lives in Vancouver, WA.

Little Beauties: A Novel. Kim Addonizio. 2005. 256p. Simon & Schuster. From Kirkus Reviews: Can two problem-laden women salvage their futures? Maternal damage looms large in this first novel, a lightweight comedy set in Long Beach, Calif., by poet Addonizio. Diana McBride’s obsessive/compulsive disorder was simultaneously overlooked and intensified by her dipsomaniac, promiscuous mother, who forced Diana into beauty pageants as a child. Jamie Ramirez gave birth at 17 because her mother is an inconsistent feminist Catholic who tolerates contraception but bans abortion. Jamie and Diana’s paths cross at a baby store called Teddy’s World, the latest place of employment in Diana’s checkered career. Whenever her rituals and countings and washings become overwhelming, she moves on in hopes of a fresh start. Husband Tim has also opted for a fresh start, driven away by rules like, “shower after emptying the trash.” An unpromising mother herself, Jamie chooses to keep baby Stella rather than give her up for adoption, unaware that the child is a marvel whose opinions and observations begin while she is still in the womb. “Babyhood is kind of confining, so far,” Stella observes, and unfortunately this Look Who’s Talking characterization is merely the most ill-judged aspect of a novel more intent on cozy conclusions than developing its one-note characters. The pace accelerates as if suddenly turbo-charged on the night of Jamie’s 18th birthday, when she picks up a boy, drops acid and takes a plane to New York. Stella abruptly falls mortally ill and begins communing with the dead wife of Anthony, a stranger who assisted at Stella’s birth and who now reappears in a bar. Diana sets aside her obsessions to save Stella, earning Anthony’s healing affections. Jamie rushes back to shoulder her burdens, and a tide of forgiveness floats everyone’s boat. Addonizio fondly indulges her insightful babies, bad mothers and troubled young women, but fails to convince readers that they should do the same.

Little Giant of Aberdeen County, The. Tiffany Baker. 2009. 341p. Grand Central Publishing. When Truly Plaice’s mother was pregnant, the town of Aberdeen joined together in betting how recordbreakingly huge the baby boy would ultimately be. The girl who proved to be Truly paid the price of her enormity; her father blamed her for her mother’s death in childbirth, and was totally ill equipped to raise either this giant child or her polar opposite sister Serena Jane, the epitome of femine perfection. When he, too, relinquished his increasingly tenuous grip on life, Truly and Serena Jane are separated—Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town on the farm of the town sadsack, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation at the hands of her peers. Serena Jane’s beauty proves to be her greatest blessing and her biggest curse, for it makes her the obsession of classmate Bob Bob Morgan, the youngest in a line of Robert Morgans who have been doctors in Aberdeen for generations. Though they have long been the pillars of the community, the earliest Robert Morgan married the town witch, Tabitha Dyerson, and the location of her fabled shadow book—containing mysterious secrets for healing and darker powers—has been the subject of town gossip ever since. Bob Bob Morgan, one of Truly’s biggest tormentors, does the unthinkable to claim the prize of Serena Jane, and changes the destiny of all Aberdeen from there on. When Serena Jane flees town and a loveless marriage to Bob Bob, it is Truly who must become the woman of a house that she did not choose and mother to her eight-year-old nephew Bobbie. Truly’s brother-in-law is relentless and brutal; he criticizes her physique and the limitations of her health as a result, and degrades her more than any one human could bear. It is only when Truly finds her calling—the ability to heal illness with herbs and naturopathic techniques—hidden within the folds of Robert Morgan’s family quilt, that she begins to regain control over her life and herself. Unearthed family secrets, however, will lead to the kind of betrayal that eventually break the Morgan family apart forever, but Truly’s reckoning with her own demons allows for both an uprooting of Aberdeen County, and the possibility of love in unexpected places. About the Author: Tiffany Baker lives in Tiburon, CA, with her husband and three children. This is her first novel.

Little Sister. Wendy MacGown. 2006. 320p. AuthorHouse. What does one do with an unwanted girl-whether an unmarried aunt in a crowded apartment, or a girl child, when a son is required? The day her nephew is born, Wong Ying Fa, a Chinese silk embroiderer, considers her future. Blessed with a lucky face and a loving family, she wants to meet a man who can hold an intelligent conversation. Li Gwai Ha is that man-traveled, sophisticated and handsome. Best of all, he wants her, and not solely because his uncle, their Party Boss, demands an heir. Her dreams die when she bears a girl. Betrayed by her family, and faced with a cruel choice, she and Gwai Ha must abandon their child in order to survive. About the Author: Wendy MacGown loves to write. She loves to read, too. Books fill her cozy house on Boston’s North Shore. For many years, she has written for business: software user guides, training guides, white papers and brochures. Before that were short stories, opinion columns, and one summer stint as photojournalist for a small local beach paper. Literature is her passion, her driving force, bordering on obsession. Two of her novels, Little Sister and The Crystal Fish Bowl, won honorable mention in the Arizona Authors Association 2005 Literary Contest. Her other passion is her family, her husband and their two precious girls, both adopted from China, who are developing an equal passion for the printed word.

U.S. 1st Edition

Living Lotus, The. Ethel Mannin (1900-1995). 1956. 320p. Jarrolds (UK). This novel centers on the life of an Anglo-Burman girl who becomes separated from her parents during the Japanese occupation of Burma and is rescued by a Burmese family. After the war, she is reluctantly reunited with her English father, who attempts to Anglicize her in London, but the pull of Buddist Burma proves irrestible to her.

Lobster & a Lady, A. Jeanne Whitmee. 1979. 223p. St Martin’s. Brought up by foster parents in a London dockside inn, Polly Harris has always had two burning ambitions: to sing in the “halls,” and to discover the identity of her real mother. Against a background of London in the 1880s, we follow Polly around the music halls, slums and houses, humble and grand, and finally discover the secrets of her past and future.

Long Acre. Claire Rayner. 1978. 276p. (The sixth book in the Performers series). Cassell (UK). Orphans Amy and Fenton arrive in London set on finding fame and fortune on the stage, like their grandmother, the legendary Lilith Lucas. Amy also has another quest. She wants to discover her family and her own origins. This search is destined to rekindle the flame of the old family feud which has smouldered for many years. While she cannot fully understand the intricacies of the hostilities, she is only too aware of her deep passion she feels for a man who has a connection with both families. [Pictured: Book Club Edition]

Long-Awaited Child, The. Tracie Peterson. 2001. 272p. Bethany House. “A child of my Own. Flesh of my flesh...” That is the deep yearning that fills Tess’s heart. Despite years spend under a doctor’s care and advances in medical technology, she and her husband have discovered their options have been exhausted, leaving them with arms empty, long-held dreams shattered. A unique opportunity arises in the form of a young pregnant teen desperate to free herself from her misguided decisions. Drawn together by their mutual needs, Tess and Sherry see a solution in what the other offers. But what appears to be an ideal agreement soon tests the fragile threads of Tess’s fledgling faith.... The answer is very different from what they were expecting.... About the Author: Tracie Peterson is a full-time author who has written over 35 historical and contemporary fiction books, including A Slender Thread and the historical series Yukon Quest. Tracie also teaches writing workshops at a variety of conferences on subjects including inspirational romance and historical research. She and her family live in Kansas.

Long Way From Home: A Novel. Frederick Busch. 1993. 292p. Ticknor & Fields. Frederick Busch’s previous best seller, Closing Arguments, was hailed as one of the most powerful novels of the year. Long Way from Home takes up where Closing Arguments left off. Relentless in its psychological and narrative drive, it is a profoundly contemporary novel about marriage, family, adoption, divorce—and the terrible nightmare of a child left in jeopardy. After Sarah abandons her family to search for her biological mother, her husband deposits their son with his in-laws and embarks on a self-destructive trip across the country to recover his wife. Sarah, heading in a different direction, locates her natural mother, an itinerant nurse and dispenser of herbal remedies named Gloria, who evinces a pronounced interest in “her” grandson. Alarmed, Sarah returns home—but not before Gloria has kidnapped the emotionally distraught boy. Sarah and her adoptive mother, Lizzie, must then set out in a desperate attempt to regain the child. Frederick Busch’s compelling novel is the tale of a family under siege, the account of the accumulating results of one desperate act taken by a wife/daughter/mother, and the story of a child at the mercy of his own disintegrating family. It triumphantly demonstrates that Frederick Busch is at the top of his craft.

Look Under the Hawthorn. Ellen Frye. 1987. 232p. New Victoria Publishers. Stone dyke Eddie Cafferty takes off from the mountains of Vermont on a search for her long lost daughter whom she gave up for adoption 32 years ago. Along the way she becomes involved with Anabelle, an unpredictable jazz pianist, on a quest of her own, trying to find her birth mother. A journey from Boston to Washington to Vancouver.

Losing Isaiah. Seth J Margolis. 1993. 374p. Hyperion. Isaiah is a bright, lively, two-and-a-half-year-old living in Manhattan. His adoptive father, Charles Lewin, owns his own graphic design firm. His mother, Margaret, is a photographer’s agent. Isaiah’s older sister, Hannah, attends an exclusive private school, while Isaiah himself spends part of his day in preschool and the rest in the company of an au pair. In alternating chapters, Margolis contrasts the privileged life-style of the Lewins with that of Selma Richards, Isaiah’s real mother, a recovering addict who, at 29, is trying to learn to read. When Selma decides she wants Isaiah back, she enlists the aid of her literary tutor, Arthur Golderson. Golderson sees the case as a way to generate publicity and make a name for himself, since the Lewins are white and Selma and Isaiah are black. Complicating the case for Selma are her illiteracy, her history as an addict, and the fact that she has very few resources with which to support a child. On the other hand, Isaiah’s adoption was not legal; and the Lewins’ picture-perfect home life is marred by Charles’ affair with a coworker. There are no easy answers in this novel, no heroes or villains. The author’s way of depicting his characters’ complex motivations helps keep the story from becoming sentimental or melodramatic. — Mary Ellen Quinn. From Booklist, Copyright © 1993, American Library Association. All rights reserved.

Lost & Found. Carolyn Parkhurst. 2006. 304p. Little, Brown. New from the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Dogs of Babel, seven unlikely couples scour the globe searching for love, treasure, fame, family—and themselves—in an astonishing new novel. Seven oddly matched pairs—a mother and daughter, two business partners, two flight attendants, a born-again Christian couple, two former child stars, and other unlikely couples—are thrown together to compete in a high-stakes, televised contest. It is the new reality show, Lost and Found, a global scavenger hunt whose initial purpose is entertainment, but with each challenge, the drama builds as the number of players is whittled down. Laura signed on to try to reconnect with her recalcitrant teenage daughter, Cassie. But Cassie knows they were only selected because of a secret she hides, one the show’s producers hope will be revealed as the pressures of the competition mount. Justin and Abby aim to use the million-dollar prize to spread their message of faith, but they soon find the game putting their marriage to the test. Juliet and Dallas, deep in the “where-are-they-now” stage of stardom, just hope to spark some life back into their flagging careers. But as the game escalates, tensions mount, temptations beckon, and the bonds between teammates begin to fray. The question is not only who will capture the final prize, but at what cost? About the Author: Carolyn Parkhurst is the author of the bestseller The Dogs of Babel. She holds an MFA in creative writing from American University. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and their son.

Lost Daughters. Laurie Alberts. 1999. 220p. University Press of New England. Lies that preoccupy, obsess, and eventually distort inform Alberts’ (The Price of Land in Shelby, 1996, etc.) tale of a mother and her daughter. Allie, the week before the birthday of Lila, the infant she gave up for adoption two decades ago, is staying in a Buddhist center in New Mexico. She’s not far from Albuquerque, where Lila first entered the world, and she’s preparing an account of her life for this daughter, just in case Lila shows up looking for her mother when the adoption records are unsealed. As for Lila in actuality (her story is told alternately with her mothers), shes now a student in Boston and pregnant herselfalthough unsure of who the father is: it could be dependable Kevin, Harvard law student, or it could be a married professor with whom she had a brief affair. So, as Lila prepares for an abortion and a cross-country drive to Colorado, where her adoptive parents are living, she revisits her own personal history. Both mother and daughter, as it happens, have survived troubled childhoods. Allie’s Jewish family hoarded painful secrets: her grandfather committed suicide, her mother was frequently depressed, her father was often violent. In adolescence, she herself turned reclusive and anorexic. For her part, Lila always felt uncomfortably different from her adoptive parents; she was a military brat, on top of it, and the constant moving about only increased her sense of alienation. Her parents have been good to her, but she still finds them blandly conventional. When she learns from her father that her birthplace was Albuquerque, she heads over to check the recordsbut Allie gets there first. Suddenly the story changes, revealing that nothing is quite as it seemed. Allie, who claims that we all lie in order to make memory bearable, has lied multiply: about the man who fathered her child, about her relationship with her mother, and much more. Timely enough, but the supposed shocks have too much a calculated feeling to stun. — From Kirkus Reviews. Copyright © 1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Lost Mother, The: A Novel. Mary McGarry Morris. 2005. 288p. Viking. From Publishers Weekly: “They said it was bad for everyone, but nobody else the boy knew had to live in the woods.” Thus begins the harrowing story of 12-year-old Thomas and eight-year-old Margaret in Morris’s powerful sixth novel. Reduced to living in a tent in Vermont during the Depression, the children and their father, Henry Talcott, a butcher who must travel daily seeking work, are barely surviving their abandonment by the children’s reluctant mother. The shattered family aches with the desire to bring home beautiful, troubled Irene while Henry crumbles into a “whipped man ... worn down and grim,” and Thomas takes on the role of caretaker. Henry’s longtime friend Gladys shows the family rare kindness, but a longstanding animosity between her crotchety father and Henry makes it impossible for the Talcotts to accept her charity. In typical Morris fashion, the author paints a brutal landscape and authentic characters with delicacy and precision: from the chaotic household of Irene’s alcoholic sister to the creepy relationship between a sick boy and his doting mother, who wants to adopt Thomas and Margaret. Never one to shy away from the messy and bleak, Morris (Songs in Ordinary Time; Vanished) unflinchingly illuminates the bitter existence of neglected children and their inspiring resilience, once again proving herself a storyteller of great compassion, insight and depth. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information

Love for Life, A. Penny Hancock. 2001. 112p. Cambridge University Press. Award-winning original fiction for learners of English. At seven levels, from Starter to Advanced, this impressive selection of carefully graded readers offers exciting reading for every student’s ability. In Cambridge, Fanella bravely faces the challenge of adopting a child alone after her partner leaves her. Fanella and five-year-old Ellie get off to a rocky start, but Fanella patiently steers their relationship on to more solid ground. Meanwhile, her relationship with Rod, Ellie’s teacher and a married man, is a little more complicated.

Love in the Asylum: A Novel. Lisa Carey. 2004. 304p. HarperCollins. Alba Elliot is tired of being crazy. In and out of Abenaki Mental Hospital more than a dozen times in ten years, fed up with diagnoses that come without cures and a life organized by a days-of-the-week pill case, the twenty-five-year-old children’s book writer is waiting for a miracle. Oscar Jameson, a thirty-year-old drug addict enrolled in the rehab program by his frustrated brother, is not looking for anything so profound. Oscar doesn’t believe he has a problem, despite the fact that his “recreation” has cost him everything. He resents the counselors, the other addicts, and his brother, all of whom insist he belongs there. The only activity Oscar looks forward to is the spirited, sarcastic conversations that have begun with Alba on the hospital lawn. And so two damaged souls forge a connection. To call it love would be courting disaster since now bright future could possibly exist between a suicidal manic-depressive and a self-deluding junkie. Then one day, in the back pages of a hospital library book, Alba finds a letter written seventy years earlier but never sent. Mary Doherty, who was committed by her husband and taken from her children, left behind secret missives about the atrocities done to her and her belief in an ancient healing power. As Alba pieces together Mary’s heartbreaking chronicle, she begins to set her hopes in a different kind of medicine. Brought together by chance, influenced by forces as beautiful and powerful as they are unforeseen, Alba and Oscar will slowly rise from the ashes of despair and self-destruction and, in the midst of righting an old wrong, begin to heal their battered spirits.

Love Wife, The. Gish Jen. 2004. 400p. Alfred A Knopf, Inc. The realities of mixed-heritage familes are explored in The Love Wife: those serio-comic moments that all families run into, but that are particularly difficult when its members are of completely different backgrounds. In this case, the non-American heritage is Chinese and the practitioner is an old hand. Gish Jen wrote Mona in the Promised Land, Who’s Irish?, and Typical American, all rich and telling contributions to immigrant literature. The Love Wife combines humor, pathos, a big surprise at the end, and dead-on dialogue between children and parents to keep the reader engaged. Carnegie Wong, only son of successful immigrant Mama Wong, much to his mother’s horror, marries big, blonde, Caucasian Jane, known ever after, pejoratively, as Blondie. Carnegie has already adopted an Asian child of unknown origin—a factor in the story—when he meets Blondie and they adopt a Chinese girl. Lizzy and Wendy are eventually joined by a bio-baby boy, Bailey, who is “half-half” and disconcertingly blonde. The family is complete, Mama Wong dies, and along with her go all her prescriptive, preemptive, insulting remarks. Not quite. Her domineering hand reaches from the grave back to China and then to Carnegie and Blondie’s home, delivering Lan, an erstwhile “cousin” Mama has bequeathed to her son and his family. She is supposed to be a nanny, but Blondie believes that she has been sent to be a “love-wife” or concubine. The entire family dynamic is changed almost instantly. Lan, a model of passive-aggression, immediately ingratiates herself to the girls. Blondie, a model of forebearance as she is berated by her eldest daughter, misunderstood by her husband and detested by Lan, tries to befriend Lan; a lesser person would have driven her from the house. Lan is so obvious that she becomes a self-parody. Blondie quits her job to spend more time with her family; Carnegie loses his, and the family is headed for implosion. This would have been quite enough plot to carry these characters into, and perhaps out of, heavy waters, but there are other complications; entrepreneurial thirst denied, racism in the ’burbs, a killing fire and bad choices abounding. It’s a very full plate at the end, which is ambiguous enough to allow the reader to believe anything. — Valerie Ryan, Amazon.com

Loving Attitudes. Rachel Billington. 1988. 211p. Hamish Hamilton (UK). Mary and David Tempest, upper-middle-class London professionals, expereince the sudden appearance of Elizabeth Crocker, Mary’s illegitimate daughter, whom she’d given up for adoption 22 years earlier and who had been raised in the U.S. Elizabeth’s appearance acts as the catalyst for a mid-life marital crisis for both the Tempests and a neighbor couple on whom their lives impinge.

Loveletters: A Novel. Susan Richards Shreve. 1978. 217p. Knopf. Kate has a best friend from the time she is nine: a wild next-door neighbor, Tommy. The friendship continues into high school until Tommy’s wildness turns into madness. Kate finds herself expecting a baby, the father is a married minister. Kate is sent to a home for unwed mothers but shocks everyone when she decides to keep her child. When she returns home, Tommy makes on a last violent attempt to posess her and she discovers the strength of her own character, and her parents rediscover the child they thought they had lost.

Lucky Gourd Shop, The. Joanna Catherine Scott. 2000. 290p. MacMurray & Beck, Inc. A heartfelt, though oddly shaped, second novel from the other Joanna Scott, whose writings about the collision of Eastern and Western cultures include both nonfiction and her well-received novel, Charlie and the Children (1997). The arresting opening pages here efficiently dramatize the uneasy assimilation to their new home (in America) of its unnamed narrator’s three adopted children: South Korean siblings whose heritage and early life she then imagines into a fully fledged narrative. It’s focused at first on their mother Mi Sook, herself a foundling raised by successive owners of the eponymous shop (which offers richly decorated gourds as good-luck charms), and by the naïve second wife of a much older man. He is Kun Soo, a laborer and truckdriver eager to shed the wife who had borne him “only” a houseful of daughters and a single brain-damaged son. Scott’s detailed pictures of Korean village and city life are fascinating, and her patient analysis of Kun Soo’s slow decline (following his first wife’s death, and his troubled marriage to Mi Sook) skillfully draws the reader in. The nexus of rigid role expectations, peasant superstition, and aggrieved male pride that drive her to fantasies of adultery and him to fateful inarticulate rage are consistently dramatic and absorbing. Unfortunately, the lengthy dénouement—in which Kun Soo’s stoical elderly mother furtively yet firmly takes control of her grandchildren’s welfare—reads more like message than fiction, and diffuses the force of the much richer (if likewise generic) conflict at the book’s core. Scott tacks on a brief history of Mi Sook’s unhappy afterthought-romance with anAmerican soldier, and her son Dae Young’s narrow escape from a life of crime. But these feel like starting-points for a novel she hasn’t written. And the story simply, abruptly ends, without further reference to the frame in which it is seemingly presented. Many good moments here, and some wonderfully empathetic characterizations, but they don’t add up to anything like a unified whole. — Copyright 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Lullaby. Jane Orcutt. 2002. 193p. Tyndale House Publishers. From Publishers Weekly: Unlike most Christian fiction with prolife themes, this sweet, inspirational novella gently unfolds a tale of how God redeems tragedy for three people in difficult circumstances, without resorting to heavy-handed proselytizing. We learn through flashbacks that the pregnant 15-year-old Merrilee Hunter was raped by a man she now presumes is dead. Her father abandoned Merrilee long ago, and her promiscuous mother recently committed suicide, leaving her alone in the world. Although Merrilee is determined to give up her child for adoption, she comforts herself by writing poignant letters to her “Baby Girl” in her journal. As the story opens, the poverty-stricken and heartsick Merrilee leaves her trailer in the small town of Palmwood, Tex., and travels to Austin to live in Adoption Lifeline’s residential home for unwed mothers. There, she selects Steven and Nora Rey, a wealthy older couple struggling with infertility, as the adoptive parents for her baby. The Reys are immediately drawn to Merrilee, although the adoption agency cautions them not to become too emotionally involved. A surprising plot twist causes all of the characters to re-evaluate their plans and their assumptions about each other. The book’s strong prolife themes, Orcutt’s solid writing and the appealing character of Merrilee should satisfy readers in the CBA market, especially those who have experienced infertility or who are prolife advocates. Orcutt’s fellow Christian writers should take note that a message-driven novel can be much more than just a sermon. © Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Mad Cows. Kathy Lette. 1996. 294p. Picador (UK). Maddy’s first day out with her newborn takes a Kafkaesque turn when she’s arrested in Harrods for shoplifting. If this is a miscarriage of justice, then detaining her in Holloway Prison’s Mother and Baby Unit is the D&C. Panicked at the thought of enforced adoption, she smuggles Jack to freedom in her friend Gillian’s handbag—a woman with the maternal instincts of a guppy fish. Finding herself a runner up in the Human Race, the only person Maddy can turn to is her hot-to-trot ex-lover Alex, who proves himself as useful as a solar-powered vibrator on a rainy day. The trouble with Alex is his sex appeal—he gives generously. Will Maddy ever escape the clutches of Edwina Phelps, prison psychologist (with the emphasis on psycho)? Will she ever see Alex for what he is: a self-made man who worships his creator? When will Alex realise that a “paternity suit” is not the latest look in men’s leisurewear? How do you brief a lawyer with a heat-seeking penis which does not report to mission control? And why the hell is Gillian searching for a sperm happy to get egg all over its face?

Maggie-Now. Betty Smith. 1958. 437p. Harper Brothers. This is the story of Maggie-Now, who grew up with the green young century among the immigrant Irish and Germans of Brooklyn. Maggie-Now was one of the givers of the world; and inevitably she attracted leaners as a post attracts ivy. By the Same Author: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Major Inversions. Gordon Highland. 2009. 276p. CreateSpace. Your roommate says you should date more, that all those spandex nights on stage paying tribute to hair metal and banging faceless groupies only amplify your Jekyll/Hyde syndrome. That this quicksand town of floozies, fiends, and filmmakers will survive without your commercial jingles. And your narcotics. That you should turn in your daytime security-guard badge and settle down. He’s got the perfect girl, a cinnamon-scented innocent who will bring that elusive substance to your life despite the familial forces that conspire against your union. Always lurking in the periphery, the roommate remains buried in his Master’s thesis, the parasitic puppeteer behind your reinvention, the search for your birth parents, and your all-too-brief film scoring career. A supporting cast of lecherous directors, deluded bandmates, federal agents, and nostalgic exes obstruct your path to closure and ironic revenge in this “revisionist character study.” Read a review on CreativeLoafing. Read another review on The Velvet.

Making of Isaac Hunt, The: A Novel. Linda Leigh Hargrove. 2007. 342p. Lift Every Voice. At his grandfather’s deathbed, Isaac Hunt, a black man with blue eyes and skin so fair he looks white, learns his parents aren’t really his parents. Armed with only his birth mother’s name and the city where she last lived and reeling from betrayal, he goes in search of her and in search of the truth about his past. His odyssey takes him deep into the south, where the Klan still rules the small town of his birth, and where more than one person does not want Isaac to uncover the truth about who he his. Along the way, he must deal with issues of faith and forgiveness in this coming-of-age novel about race, identity, courage, and truth.

Mansfield Park: A Novel. Jane Austen. 1814. T Egerton (London). Through Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen views the social mores of her day and contemplates human nature itself. A shy and sweet-tempered girl adopted by wealthy relations, Fanny is an outsider looking in on an unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, world. But Fanny eventually wins the affection of her benefactors, endearing herself to the Bertram family and the reader alike.

Map of the Invisible World. Tash Aw. 2009. 352p. McClelland & Stewart (Canada). Set during the tumultuous “Year of Living Dangerously” in post-colonial Indonesia, a stunning follow-up to the international debut literary sensation The Harmony Silk Factory. Sixteen-year-old Adam is an orphan three times over. He and his older brother, Johan, were abandoned by their mother as children; then Adam watched as Johan was taken away by a wealthy couple; and now Karl, the artist who raised Adam, has been arrested by soldiers during Sukarno’s drive to purge 1960s Indonesia of its colonial past. All Adam has to guide him in his quest to find Karl are some old photos and letters—one of which sends him to the colourful, dangerous capital, Jakarta, and to Margaret, an American whose own past is bound up with Karl’s. Soon, both have embarked on journeys of discovery that seem destined to turn tragic. Woven hauntingly into this page-turning story is the voice of Johan, who is living a seemingly carefree, privileged life in Malaysia, but who is careening out of control as he cannot forget his long-ago betrayal of his helpless, trusting brother. Map of the Invisible World confirms Tash Aw as one of the most exciting young voices on the international stage. About the Author: Tash Aw’s debut novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award 2005 and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2006, as well as being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is Malaysian by birth and now lives in London, England.

Maple Dale. MaryAnn Myers. 1999. 173p. LightHouse Literary Press, Inc. Maple Dale is about an equestrian center that is sold to a developer, and the efforts of one woman to prevent its demise against all odds. Her efforts threaten to destroy her, until ultimately one person and then another, and then another, join together on her behalf. An orphan and lost, they help her find her way by devising a solution that addresses everyone’s needs and concerns, and thus become a community.

Marilyn’s Daughter: A Novel. John Rechy. 1988. 531p. Carroll & Graf Publishers. Speculative fictional account of what might have happened if Marilyn Monroe had had a daughter. Following the suicide of the woman she assumed to be her mother, Normalyn discovers a letter asserting that she is the illegitimate daughter of Marilyn Monroe. Desperate to learn the truth, Normalyn travels from Texas to California to question a Pulitzer Prize-winning author obsessed with Monroe’s last days, an aging gossip columnist who loathed the blonde actress, and a married couple formerly employed by Monroe’s movie studio to sanitize the star’s public image.

Marquis at Bay. Albert Belisle Davis. 1992. 386p. Louisiana State University Press. In a bayou town southwest of New Orleans, one night in the mid- 1940s, a secret death and burial occur. The consequences spread as slowly, darkly, and irresistibly as roots beneath every corner of the town’s life—until, in a wild Carnival season at the dawn of the season at the dawn of the civil rights era, an outsider arrives.

Materassi Sisters, The. Aldo Palazzeschi. Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson. 1953. 300p. Secker & Warburg (London); 1953. 316p. Doubleday.

Matters of Chance: A Novel. Jeannette Haien. 1997. HarperCollins. The storybook marriage of Morgan and Maude Shurtcliff, a couple raising their adopted twin daughters in the country outside New York City, is put to the test when Morgan goes off to World War II and other lovers beckon. By the author of The All of It.

Matters of Hart. Marianne Ackerman. 2005. 230p. McArthur Publishing. Set in Montreal, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, the novel tells the story of Hart Granger through the voices of five important women in his life, and through his journal. Middle-aged, divorced, privileged, ironic and arrogant, Hart is already suffering an identity crisis when an older half-brother, given up for adoption, appears at his 50th birthday party, shedding light on his family’s history and disrupting the way things have always been. Hart escapes to L.A. to write a screenplay, and on September 11th - that day of massive change for the world - has an accident which convinces his family he has died. This gives him the opportunity to literally step into someone else’s shoes and embark on a journey that fundamentally alters who he is and how he perceives his life, his past, his role in the world and in his family. — Tess Fragoulis [Read the entire review]

Matters of Honor. Louis Begley. 2007. 320p. Knopf. From Kirkus Reviews: The professional success and personal setbacks of a Harvard-educated, Polish-American Jew, as seen by his best friend. Sam, Archie and Henry arrive at Harvard in the early 1950s; more than half this story describes their comfortable lives there. They are unlikely roommates: Sam and Archie, both Wasps, are intrigued by the exotic Henry, a Jew from Brooklyn with a Polish accent. He arrived in the U.S. with his parents in 1947, after years spent hiding from the Nazis. Though not the most proud Jew, he will acknowledge his Jewish identity, if asked. His brilliant progress at Harvard will be complicated by his pursuit of Margot, the beautiful stranger who had blown kisses at him on his arrival. Narrator Sam has just learned he was adopted at birth and is glad he has no biological links to the “cuckoo couple” who raised him. Curiously, the matter is then dropped. The ensuing lack of attention to Sam’s development throws the novel seriously out of whack (Archie was never more than a bit player). He becomes a successful novelist (just like that!), but stays single. Does he have a sex life? Who knows? The focus stays on Henry, and Henry’s on-again, off-again relationship with Margot, coupled with his attempts to avoid his over-protective, self-dramatizing mother. The story moves sluggishly forward on a tide of social engagements implicitly celebrating money and class. Though he never manages to corral Margot, Henry does very well for himself. As partner in a top New York law firm, he advises a fabulously rich Belgian count, “a bird of prey.” The two fall out over an intricate scheme to protect the Count’s bank, and Henry has a crisis of conscience over betrayal of his Jewish roots. The crisiswould have been more convincing had the Count not fired him first. Despite a suicide and a near-fatal beating, this is a generally anemic novel from Begley (Shipwreck, 2003, etc.).

Maximum Light. Nancy Kress. 1997. 256p. Tor. By the middle of the twenty-first century the worldwide fertility rate has declined nearly eighty percent. No one knows why. Now the average age in the United States is fifty-four, and children are treasured and spoilt by those lucky enough to have them and coveted by the vast majority who can’t. Maximum Light is the story of three people from different sections of this very different American society. Nick Clementi is seventy-five years old, a doctor, and an advisor to the Congressional Advisory Committee for Medical Crises. Shana Walders is twenty-six and has just finished her two years in the National Service Corps. Cameron Atuli is twenty-eight, a principal dancer with the National Ballet, and has willingly had a portion of his memory removed; what it was and why he did it, he doesn’t know. In her last days of National Service, Shana witnesses something so horrible that it is immediately brought to the attention of Clementi’s committee, but so shocking that even the committee would like to believe that it can’t be true. And what Cameron can’t remember may be the key to the mystery.

Member of the Family, A. Mary Arkley Carter. 1974. 232p. Doubleday. Labor Day on Cape Cod, all the Thachers gathered for an end-of-summer celebration, John Thacher was happy with his life, in a matter of days that changed after a Boston taxicab skidding in a rainstorm took the life of his only child in a space between moments. How John and Ellie Thacher moved through their lives after that death is the essence of this deeply moving story.

Member of the Family, A. Susan Merrell. 2000. 304p. HarperCollins. Deborah and Chris Latham have everything they could possibly want: a warm, loving marriage, a beautiful daughter, and a stable life in a sweet resort community on Long Island. When they hear about a small Romanian boy who is languishing in a depressed Eastern European orphanage, neither Deborah nor Chris hesitates for an instant. They want Mihai for their own, and they know they can help him. If any family has enough love to spare, it is the Lathams. In a matter of months, Mihai becomes Michael Latham. Deborah, Chris, and their three-year-old daughter, Caroline, take him in eagerly, knowing that soon enough he will truly feel like a member of the family. But as time passes, Michael grows more unpredictable, careening between violent behavior and emotional withdrawal. Living with such difficulties in their midst has its cost for all of the Lathams and as the family members respond in their own ways, and for their own reasons, the questions begin to surface. How much love does it take to save a child from his past? Is there such a thing as unconditional parental love? Should a family’s survival take precedence over that of one of its members? Where do you draw the line? And at what cost? With unflinching honesty, A Member of the Family asks questions most parents never dream of considering. Eloquent and provocative, this exquisitely written novel may break your heart, but you will never forget it. About the Author: Susan Merrell is also the author of The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. This is her first novel.

Memoir Club, The. Laura Kalpakian. 2003. 288p. St Martin’s Press. Six women, each with her own misgivings, take a university Extension night class in Writing Your Memoir, looking only for a little bibliotherapy. The following semester, they meet privately; the memoir class becomes the Memoir Club. In coming to terms with their losses, with their own guilt—in writing to break through that stubborn, opaque barrier to the past—they forge a new present. And a new future. Their teacher, the enigmatic Penny Taylor, steps in at the right moment and steps out before her students can thank her. In the beginning, grief-stricken Dr. Caryn Henley only goes to the class at the insistence of her longtime friend, Nell, a woman so loyal that behind her back people call her “the St. Bernard.” Rusty Meadows wants to write a memoir for a daughter she gave up at birth. Mrs. Francine Hellman wants her memoir to laud her late husband, the scientist Dr. Marcus Hellman, only to find he had a past unknown to her. The elderly, unconventional Sarah Jane Perkins writes to come to terms with the cruelties her rigid mother inflicted on her artistic, bootlegging father. And Korean-born Jill McDougall comes to the memoir class to find out who she is, and why she’s living in a warehouse with a man who loves ice cream. These students of the memoir achieve what they set out to do, but discover what they never expected. Then an act of violence alters their lives forever.

Memoirs of a Sensual Youth. Marshall Ford. 1970. Dell. When young Marshall and his beautiful foster sister, Anglea, were taken from the orphanage, exciting changes began in their lives. The handsome man and stiking woman who adopted Marshall and Angela had very advanced ideas about education—and they began their erotic lessons right away.

Memories of Ana Calderon, The. Graciela Limon. 1994. 200p. Arte Publico Press. In this artfully written novel about a Mexican woman, Limon (In Search of Bernab) offers a soapy plot and scant new insights into the immigrant experience. Ana Calderon’s story is revealed in sections in the third person, which alternate with shorter first-person comments. Ana was born and raised in southern Mexico. Her family believed that she had poisoned her mother’s womb for males, because after her birth three sons were born and died. After her mother’s death in 1932, her family—including an orphan named Octavio Arce who was adopted unofficially—moves north and then crosses the border to the United States in search of work. Ana’s father is so naive that he believes he will find employment as a fisherman in Los Angeles because it is a coastal city. There the tale loses much of its lyricism and almost all credibility. Ana and Octavio begin a secret affair, and when Ana’s father discovers she is pregnant (he doesn’t know Octavio is the father), he beats her and threatens to kill her. She is taken in by a local Japanese woman and then, after Octavio arranges for them to marry but leaves her at the altar, she goes to live with a friendly, Bible-reading couple on a chicken ranch where she gives birth to a son named Ismael. Meanwhile, Octavio marries Ana’s crafty sister Alejandra. When Octavio has regrets and tries to steal Ismael, Ana shoots him and is sent to prison. While she is there, Ismael is given up for adoption. Upon her release, Ana finds a job, goes to college, and eventually becomes wealthy—but, bereft of her son, she is still miserable. A preposterous ending ruins this simple tale. — From Kirkus Reviews; ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Memories of My Ghost Brother. Heinz Insu Fenkl. 1996. 271p. Dutton. Autobiographical first novel told from the point of view of a young Amerasian boy, the son of a “yellow-haired” German-American GI and his Korean wife. Young Insu grows up in Inchon in a house that was owned by a Japanese colonel during WW II. Korean resisters were tortured here in the beautiful garden, but Insu, a sensitive boy, prefers to imagine the cruel colonel to have been more like a harsh surrogate father than a murderer. Insu’s sorrows exist not only in his imagination. His mother gave up her other son for adoption so that her GI lover, Insu’s father, would marry her. The missing brother is like a missing limb, and because of him, Insu despises his profane, profoundly alien father, whom he visits periodically on a post near the DMZ. There, he learns of other worlds: the Vietnam his father has been transferred from, the Germany where his Caucasian grandparents live, and, strangest of all, the America that he senses will shape his destiny. Although his father is diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Insu and his mother emigrate to America; she goes in the hope of finding her lost son, who had been adopted by an American couple. In the new land, an overwhelmed Insu tries to form an identity out of his mixed heritage of Korean folklore, Inchon street-life, and the black market strategies of his mother, all amid the confusion of America. Eventually, he begins to find his own way. He does well in school and his future is promising. And yet his brother, a symbol of his wrenching past, and of the difficult relationship between America and Korea, will always haunt him. Rather slow-moving, and different from its obvious antecedent, Gus Lee’s moving but awkward China Boy. Think instead of James Agee’s A Death in the Family: not as powerful, perhaps, but equally lyrical, dreamy, and sad. — From Kirkus Reviews. Copyright © 1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mercy Rule, The: A Novel. Perri Klass. 2008. 288p. Houghton Mifflin. A trenchant, funny, and timely novel about what makes a good parent and who should judge that issue. At first glance, Dr. Lucy Weiss looks like the typical high-achieving, upper-middle-class working mother who, along with her husband, is bringing up much-beloved children in the suburbs. But Lucy’s own history makes her an anomaly. Having overcome a difficult childhood in foster care, she is what’s called a super-survivor. Now a pediatrician, Lucy finds herself working with some of those same at-risk patients and their families. The Mercy Rule is a novel about the all-important job of taking care of children. Lucy’s work takes her back into the world of families living on the edge, where every day she must decide whether a parent’s actions are so incompetent—or so clueless—that a child is in danger. It’s her job to make the call, and to step in when she has to. As she moves between her disparate worlds—from worrying about her own brilliant but odd son being labeled with a diagnosis to worrying about parents struggling with drugs and impossible living situations—Lucy must judge herself as a parent, critique other parents, and also deal with the echoes of her childhood. Watching Lucy try to keep the balance, enjoy her own children, and look at other families with humor and justice and mercy, readers will understand why Chris Bohjalian said of Perri Klass, “Few writers write as beautifully or as authentically about parenting.” About the Author: Perri Klass is the award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction works. Most recently, she wrote Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor. She is a practicing pediatrician and the medical director of the national literacy program Reach Out and Read, dedicated to promoting literacy as part of pediatric primary care.

Message From Forever: A Novel of Aboriginal Wisdom. Marlo Morgan. 1998. 323p. Cliff Street Books. Message from Forever follows the lives of Australian aboriginal twins who were taken form their young mother by Christian missionaries. The baby boy is sent to a huge sheep ranch, where he grows up with little adult supervision and random affection. On his own, Geoff develops his talent as an artist, producing work at a level well beyond his five years. The boy is adopted by an American minister and is raised in New England with little sense of who he is or of his cultural heritage. His sister is given only the first name Beatrice by the nuns at an Australian orphanage, where she encounters continual racism and experiences shattering looses for the first 18 years of her life. Upon reaching adulthood, Beatrice leaves the orphanage to work at a boardinghouse. Beatrice hungers to know more about her ancestral roots. She walks away from her life in the city to strike out into the northern desert nation, where she goes on a walkabout with a small band of Aborigines. Geoff does not fare so well in America. As a teen, he runs away from home and slips into a life of crime, alcohol, and alienation. His addictions destroy him, and he finds himself on Death Row with little sense of how he got there. After decades of learning about people in the Outback, Beatrice leaves her nomadic life to become a “runner between both worlds.” She returns to the Mutant world as a political activist fighting for aboriginal rights of citizens arrested and convicted of crimes in foreign countries, as well as a champion of the rights of adults who were taken from their native culture as children. Her life’s work bring her into contact with her lost brother, though neither is aware of their relationship. Beatrice gives Geoff the “message from forever,” which outlines aboriginal philosophy and principles of good living, along with an offer to return to Australia. As we read the message with Geoff, we are challenged to stretch our concepts of identity, spirituality, and openness transcends injustice and degradation, directing us to live our lives in accordance with ageless values and simple wisdom.

Michel, Michel. Robert Lewis. 1967. 735p. Simon & Schuster. Michel, Michel is huge, profoundly conceived and rich-executed novel is about the battle for session of a child. The child is Michel Benedek, whose Jewish parents have died in France at the hands of the Nazis, and who has been saved a Frenchwoman, a Catholic, lovingly raised by her and, against the regulations of canon law, baptized. When at the war’s end he is claimed by his aunt in Israel, his foster mother “Maman Rose,” refuses to give him up—and the battle is joined. What begins as a personal quarrel in a small provincial town slowly and inexorably grows into a cause célèbre—as the hierarchy of the Church and the leaders of French Jewry become involved, as the boy is hidden, passed from one secret refuge to another by Maman Rose and by the priests and nuns who will not surrender him to apostasy, as the Benedek Affair becomes a national scandal. The conflict that divides France—reviving old passions, calling forth prodigies of sacrifice and courage from both sides, stirring up currents of anti-Semitism and anticlericalism—is played out in the heart of the child himself. It is Michel—torn apart and devastated by opposing loyalties and loves and demands—who in the end must make his own choice, decide his own fate. The sweep of the narrative, the brilliant clarity of dramatic incident and character, the unfaltering suspense, the generosity of feeling that embraces men and women of conflicting ideals, the powerful sense of history and, above all, the loving and whole portrayal of the child at the center of the storm, combine to make a work of art—a novel that will, we are certain, command the deep engagement and admiration of its readers. About the Author: Born in 1916, Robert Lewis has dedicated his life to study, teaching and writing. He has a B.A. degree in English from St. John’s College in Annapolis and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Johns Hopkins University. He has also done graduate work in English and studied Italian literature and art at the University of Bologna as an Exchange Fellow. During World War II, Lewis served as interpreter and translator with the U.S. Seventh Army, whose fortunes he followed from North Africa to Italy, France and Germany. At the invasion of southern France in August 1944, his hazardous liaison work with the French First Army and the Resistance movement won him the Croix de Guerre. Upon his return to civilian life he wrote short stories largely based on his experiences as interpreter for the Allied Control Commission courts in Italy and Army courts-martial in France. These stories have been published in Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and other magazines. His first story, “Little Victor,” won the O. Henry Special Award as the Best First Published Story of 1947. His interest in fencing, at which he has won a number of championships in the United States and Italy, led him to collaborate with Clovis Deladrier, the latw Maître d’Armes of the U.S. Naval Academy, in the writing of the manual “Modern Fencing,” which has become a classic in the field. Since 1955 Lewis has made his home in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with his wife Piri and their children Roberto and Carmel-ina. He is now Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico. Michel, Michel is his first novel. — From the dust jacket

Midnight Cab. James W Nichol. 2004. 336p. Canongate Books. From Kirkus Reviews: The Canadian playwright’s first novel, based on his own radio drama and first published in his native country in 2002, traces the links across a generation between two lost boys. Walker Devereaux remembers his mother leaving him clinging tightly to a wire fence when he was three years old. And he has a letter that seems to have been written to Lennie, his absent mom, by her school friend Kim, plus a photo that presumably shows the two girls together. But that’s all he knows about Lennie or his own early life. At 19, he leaves his adoptive family in Big River to trace a possible lead to Toronto, where he finds a cheap apartment, a night job driving a cab, and a rapidly blooming friendship with Krista Papadopoulos, his wheelchair-bound dispatcher. What he doesn’t find is Lennie. In fact, somebody seems to have a special interest in frustrating his search-somebody who breaks into his place, steals the letter and photo, sets fire to Krista’s car, and kills a cat who’s adopted Walker in turn. Undeterred by these obligatory threats, he traces Lennie to a suburban Ontario town and,ultimately, to Jamaica. As Walker zeroes in on his goal, Nichol keeps flashing back to the story of Bobby Nuremborski, a disturbed little boy 16 years older than Walker who becomes an even more disturbing young man under pressure from his demanding, protective father and his shameful attraction to other boys. Though it’s obvious that these two stories will collide, and almost equally obvious how, Nichol keeps tension high by slipping off-kilter new characters into the deck and dangling repeated false solutions in front of Walker until it’s finally time to bring his two frightened children face to face. A highlyeffective thriller that freshens familiar scenes, dodges, and themes by fleshing them out with an appealingly new cast.

Midwife’s Tale, The. Gretchen Moran Laskas. 2003. 256p. Dell Publishing Company, Inc. “I come from a long line of midwives,” narrates Elizabeth Whitely. “I was expected to follow Mama, follow Granny, follow Great-granny. In the end, I didn’t disappoint them. Or perhaps I did. After all, there were no more midwives after me.” For generations, the women in Elizabeth’s family have brought life to Kettle Valley, West Virginia, heeding a destiny to tend its women with herbals, experience, and wisdom. But Elizabeth, who has comforted so many, has lost her heart to the one man who cannot reciprocate, even when she moves into his home to share his bed and raise his child. Then Lauren Denniker, Elizabeth’s adopted daughter, begins to display a miraculous gift—just as Elizabeth learns that she herself is unable to have a child. How Elizabeth comes to free herself from a loveless relationship, grapple with Lauren’s astonishing abilities, and come to terms with her own emptiness is the compelling heart of this remarkable tale. Incorporating the spirited mountain mythology of prewar Appalachia, Gretchen Laskas has crafted a story as true to our time as its own, and a cast of characters as poignant as they are entirely original. About the Author: Gretchen Moran Laskas is an eighth-generation West Virginian. She now lives in Virginia with her husband and son.

Mingled Yarn, A. Candace Toft. 2000. 252p. iUniverse.com. A Mingled Yarn explores the relationship between a woman who gave up her child for adoption 23 years before and a young woman who may or may not be her daughter. Set in San Diego and a ranch near Billings, Montana, it has the feel and pace of a mystery novel, but the mystery it solves is within the human heart. About the Author: A former middle school principal, Candace Toft is currently a University administrator. She has three children and lives in San Diego.

Miracle Child, The. Calvin D Atchison. 2008. 188p. PublishAmerica. Mark and Jasmine Hunter have been married for twelve wonderful years. She planned to give birth until her dream is shattered in a car accident that nearly takes her life. They look toward the possibility of adopting a child. Two social workers come together on their behalf along with two great missionaries in Africa to make their dream come true. They have no idea that they will be the first African-Americans to adopt a child from the Congo, thus making history in America and Africa. Mark has no idea that he will become a hero when he helps apprehend a fugitive during an attempted bank robbery. Mark was at the right place at the right time. It was Derrick Jones who was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Miracle Hater, The. Shulamith Hareven. Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. 1988. 96p. North Point Press. From Publishers Weekly: This small jewel by a prominent Israeli writer is an inspired revision of the biblical Exodus, the Hebrews’ worship of the Golden Calf and their brutal, seemingly endless, 40-year desert sojourn. The canny novella vivifies the rebel Hebrew slaves as impoverished refugees living at the mercy of the Egyptian populace, the immensity of their freedom when they flee Egypt and the generation born in the desert who, “like doorless and windowless houses,” retain no memory of slavery. In Hareven’s tale, the “miracle man” Moses is a remote leader, “who could not stand being touched,” and the focus is on Eshkhar, an outcast even among the desert wanderers. Frustrated by the misery of his thirsty, sickly people, he roams beyond the camp and discovers “that the desert was inhabited, that it had limits, that it could be crossed from end to end in a matter of weeks. The deception of miracles was keeping them purblind and lost.” Halkin’s careful translation illuminates the ways in which the author’s spare, lyric prose, embroidered with archaisms, complementsand amplifiesthe language of the bible. Hareven is the author of The City of Many Days. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, The: A Novel. Brady Udall. 2001. 423p. WW Norton & Co. If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close. With these words Edgar Mint, half-Apache and mostly orphaned, makes his unshakable claim on our attention. In the course of Brady Udall?s high-spirited, inexhaustibly inventive novel, Edgar survives not just this bizarre accident, but a hellish boarding school for Native American orphans, a well-meaning but wildly dysfunctional Mormon foster-family, and the loss of most of the illusions that are supposed to make life bearable. What persists is Edgar’s innate goodness, his belief in the redeeming power of language, and his determination to find and forgive the man who almost killed him. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a miracle of storytelling, bursting with heartache and hilarity and inhabited by characters as outsized as the landscape of the American West. About the Author: Brady Udall, author of the highly praised Letting Loose the Hounds, teaches at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.

Misfortune. Wesley Stace. 2005. 544p. Little Brown. One of the most auspicious debuts of recent years, Wesley Stace’s Misfortune follows the rise, fall, and triumphant return of Rose Old, a foundling rescued from a London garbage heap in 1820 by the richest man in Britain. Lord Geoffroy Loveall, whose character has been shaped by perpetual mourning for a sister who died in childhood, seizes on the infant as a replacement for his beloved sister. With the help of trusted servants, he arranges for the child to be lovingly brought up at his ancestral mansion, Loveall Hall—to all appearances, his biological daughter and unhoped-for heir. No matter that the baby is not a girl.

Missing, The. Beverly Lewis. 2009. 336p. Bethany House. Readers anxiously await the second book in this moving series filled with mystery and family secrets, love and loss, heartbreak and healing. Twenty-one-year-old Grace Byler longs to find her missing mother and to uncover the secret that drove her to leave them three weeks before. Grace suspects the reason has to do with her father and his reserved, uncommunicative ways. This conviction led Grace to break off her betrothal to her quiet, staid beau, and she is now resigned to remain single. But when the young Amishman she thought was courting her best friend takes a sudden interest in her, Grace is befuddled and wonders if he can be trusted. “Englisher” Heather Lang has come to Amish country to relive fond memories of her mother and to contemplate a grave medical prognosis of her own. While in Bird-in-Hand, Heather meets Grace Byler and the two young women strike up a fast friendship, amazed by how well they click. Following the only clue they have, Grace and Heather travel together in hopes of finding Grace’s mother and bringing her home. Will they find what they’re looking for...or something much more? About the Author: Beverly Lewis, raised in Pennsylvania Amish country, is a former schoolteacher, an accomplished musician, and an award-winning author of of more than eighty books, many of which have appeared on bestseller lists including USA Today and the New York Times. Her novel The Brethren won a 2007 Christy Award for excellence in Christian fiction. Beverly and her husband, David, live in Colorado Springs, CO.

Missing Pieces. April Ann Erwin. 2003. 197p. Trafford Publishing Co (Canada). Elaine thought she had accepted her life as an adopted child. Now, on the verge of college graduation and her 21st birthday, she’s not so sure. A recurring dream from her childhood has returned. Who is the old man in the dream and why does it seem so important to fi nd him? Despite her mother’s pleas, Elaine begins a search that leads her from Boston, MA, to Independence, MO. Alone for the first time in her life, Elaine is faced with choices she wouldn’t have imagined. What is she really searching for, and will she be willing to accept what she finds? Love, faith and family will all be tested as she searches for the “missing pieces.” For more information please visit www.theerwins.com. About the Author: April Ann Erwin was born and raised in Independence, Missouri where she still resides with her faithful dog Raquel. This is the fi rst of what she hopes will be a long succession of novels. Raised in the Gospel, one of April’s lifelong dreams was to become a writer and use it as a vehicle to witness of her Christian faith. She also enjoys singing and traveling. Her other hobbies include songwriting, graphology and photography.

Mr Vertigo. Paul Auster. 1994. 293p. Faber & Faber (UK). The eighth novel from the author of Leviathan and The Music of Chance is the story of a St. Louis orphan boy who learns how to levitate and becomes “Walt the Wonder Boy” and dazzles audiences during the Depression.

Mixed Blessings. Danielle Steel. 1992. 369p. Delacorte. This novel describes the infertility problems faced by three couples. Diana and Andrew Douglas are happily married, but Diana has been unable to conceive, now they are becoming desperate and are beginning to investigate the possibility of surrogacy or adoption. Charlie Winwood, after growing up as an orphan, dreams of having his own family, but can he convince his actress wife to risk her career by having a baby? Pilar Graham is in her forties and married to a man in his sixties who is about to become a grandfather—is she mad to want to start a family with him at this point in their lives?

Mockymen. Ian Watson. 2003. 300p. Golden Gryphon Press. This wonderfully weird tale uncovers the secrets of the “mockymen,” aliens who have inhabited drug-addled humans’ bodies. A young British couple who make jigsaw puzzles are hired for an outlandish job in a park by an elderly Norwegian man. Toward the end of the Second World War, a blood sacrifice was carried out in this park by Nazis trying to create an occult cordon around Norway, and the aging Norwegian hopes to access the power residing in the park to achieve reincarnation for himself. The Hardship Years intervene, when climate change, ecological collapse, and global economic crises derail human civilization, but in 2010 salvation arrives in the shape of an alien expedition promising new technologies. As the aliens begin to inhabit the bodies of humans strung out on the drug Bliss, a young Blisshead named Jamie recalls his prior life as a Norwegian, and the aliens’ true motives are revealed. This wild, absurd, and far-out tale reveals a keen intelligence at work and at play. About the Author: Born in England in 1943, Ian Watson graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1963 with a first class Honours degree in English Literature, followed in 1965 by a research degree in English and French 19th Century literature. After lecturing in literature at universities in Tanzania and Tokyo, and in Futures Studies (including Science Fiction) in Birmingham, England, he became a full-time writer in 1976 following the success of his first novel, The Embedding (1973) which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and in France the Prix Apollo, and The Jonah Kit (1975) which won the British Science Fiction Association Award and the Orbit Award. Numerous novels of SF, Fantasy, and Horror followed, and many story collections. His stories have been finalists for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and widely anthologised. His novels have been translated into 14 languages. From 1990 to 1991 he worked full-time with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, finally directed by Steven Spielberg, for which he has screen credit for Screen Story. His memoirs of working with Stanley Kubrick appeared in Playboy in August 1999. In 2001 DNA Publications issued his first chapbook of poetry, The Lexicographer’s Love Song, and in Spring 2002 Golden Gryphon Press published his ninth story collection, entitled The Great Escape, chosen by the Washington Post as a book of the year. In 2003 Golden Gryphon Press published his newest SF novel, Mockymen.

Moloka’i. Alan Brennert. 2003. 384p. St Martin’s Press. A screenwriter and a fantasy author, Alan Brennert vividly and graphically details both the Hawaiian landscape and the disease of leprosy as he tells the story of Rachel Kalama, who contracts the affliction as a child in the late 19th Century and is immediately sent to to the isolated settlement on Molaka’i. Rachel is doomed not just to suffer horribly, but also to bear witness to the most significant events of Hawaiian history: the end of the monarchy, annexation by the United States, the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor. The book also deals with changes in the treatment of leprosy, from herbal injections, surgery, and, finally, the arrival of a cure in the form of sulfa drugs in the 1940s. As Hawaii changes, Rachel grows up, falls in love, and marries Kenji, a fellow patient, with whom she bears a daughter, whom she must surrender for adoption to avoid infecting her. Other tragedies that befall her include the violent death of her husband and the loss of the fingers of her right hand. However, unexpected reunions (with her family and her lost daughter) compensate for her hard-knock life as she returns to a much-changed Honolulu after undergoing curative treatment.

Mommy Club, The. Sarah Bird. 2003. 319p. Random House, Inc. At thirty-eight, Trudy Herring is a dreamer, a sculptor of whimsical clay figures, and a permanent temporary worker at the San Antonio Museum of Folk Art. But all that changes when she agrees to incubate a child for Hillary Goettler (her boss) and Hillary’s husband. Trudy moves into their mansion and is instantly thrust into a luxurious world she’s never known before. While Hillary opines that parenthood is simply a “time-management problem,” Trudy is forced to consume noxiously healthy meals in a home where the decor changes faster than a Neiman Marcus window display. As her body warms to the other life inside, Trudy begins to long for her old flame, Sinclair Coker, “a freelance mystic with a lot of enthusiasm for the carnal.” The quest to satisfy her cravings leads Trudy to discover that it takes a lot more than war stories about childbirth and potty training for a woman to qualify for true membership in “the mommy club.”

Moonraker’s Bride. Peter O’Donnell (writing as “Madeleine Brent”). 1973. 352p. Souvenir (UK). Lucy Waring lives with her family in China at the turn of the 20th century. It is the only home she knows, so far. Her views of life are shaped by the culture in which she lives. To Lucy, struggling to feed her starving charges in a Chinese mission, England is an unknown, mysterious land, except for a treasured picture of a splendid house, Moonrakers; then a chance meeting leads to a tragic marriage and she comes to England to begin a new life (“The stranger she married that night was gone by morning. But for the rest of her days, she would be the Moonraker’s Bride.”) There she sees the real Moonrakers, and is soon involved in a bitter feud which eventually leads her back to war-torn China; amid danger and heartbreak, she at last finds where her heart belongs.

Moonrise. Mitchell Smith. 2004. 480p. (Snowfall Trilogy, #3). Forge. Several hundred years after a change in the orbit of Jupiter sent the Earth into a new Ice Age, remnants of civilization battle over territory and technology. A generation has passed since Sam Monroe defeated the Great Khan, became King of Middle Kingdom, and ushered in an era of peace and prosperity, a time when Middle Kingdom grew even more powerful, driven by trade and emerging technology. In a grand gesture, Sam and Queen Rachel adopted the young son of their former enemy and raised him as a prince, second only to the heir to Middle Kingdom’s throne. The accidental drowning deaths of the King and Queen trigger the assassination of the Crown Price. Bajazet, too, is attacked, lest he serve as a rallying point for those who support the royal family. Barely twenty, the once-pampered Bajazet flees for his life. Stumbling through the forest, prey where he once was the hunter and with the usurper King’s forces on his heels, Bajazet is rescued by a trio of genetically engineered “Persons”: Richard, who is almost more bear than human; Nancy, a cunning little vixen; and Errol, whose very human exterior hides a weasel’s cold, cruel heart. Boston, buried under glacial ice, gave them life. Boston’s perverted technology, used to conquer and oppress, seems almost like magic to the North Americans who are slowly dragging themselves back up the ladder of civilization. Now the rulers of Boston eye the chaos in Middle Kingdom and find it ripe for conquest. Bajazet’s new friends are plotting the frozen city’s destruction. The one-time Prince, now a lonely warrior, has one choice—help destroy Boston, or die.

More Bread or I’ll Appear. Emer Martin. 1999. 271p. Houghton Mifflin Co. Irish writer Martin’s audacious second novel (after Breakfast in Babylon, 1997) traces the odd lives and uncertain prospects of the five children of a self-absorbed mother and a father hounded by mental illness. At the heart of this sad, sharp-eyed story is a quest. Aisling, the eldest child, the one most like a real mother to the other four as they’re growing up, eventually flees the children’s native Ireland, communicating only intermittently with the family. Later, several of the other children depart as well, to England or to America, restlessly searching for some sort of life worth living. Keelin, the youngest, most nearly stable, and most responsible, is finally persuaded by her mother to go in search of Aisling, who, after years of adventures abroad, has disappeared. The sensual, assertive Aisling has left a variety of beguiled or battered figures in her wake, and as Keelin retraces her sisters erratic pathleading her to the seamy underside of Tokyo, then on to America, she begins to sense a liberating effect: new possibilities, a life outside the old rather dull certainties, suddenly seems possible. There are other adventures along the way: Keelin’s sister Orla reclaims a son she gave up for adoption many years before; Patrick, Keelin’s only brother, sinks deeper into a series of phobic, self-destructive rituals. And Oscar, Keelin’s uncle, who is both gay and a priest, finds his carefully suppressed past irresistibly catching up with him. Martin renders all of this in a prose of exuberant power and velocity. While the fate of many of the characters is more grim than joyful, and while Keelin’s climactic confrontation with Aisling in a setting of tropical squalor is more painful than liberating, the novel nonetheless carries a kind of jaunty, defiant good humor right to its close. Startling, distinctive work thats about the way families shape lives, and that charts with a kind of unflinching precision the costs of escaping from the past. — From Kirkus Reviews. Copyright © 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mosquito War, The. VA MacAlister. 2001. 320p. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC. Solidly entertaining biotech-thriller debut with enough romance and nuance to keep it out of the men’s hardware ghetto. Despite the occasional misstep (“The swollen blood vessels of Asher’s brain began to burst, like balloon animals drifting into the barbecue”), MacAlister has created likable and believable protagonists and sent them through a smart plot at an agreeable rate. Though by no means tamed, Conor Gale has grown tired of his brawling, pool-hustling, drifter’s life. Returning to D.C. to work for Chapmans, a private security firm founded and run by Mickey Sullivan, whose family adopted Conor as a boy, he notices an unlikely string of accidents associated with client pharmaceutical firm, SeaGenesis. Smart and sexy Marine biologist Zee Aspen, head of SeaGenesis’s Caribbean research station is investigating naturally occurring drugs, with an emphasis on a promising sponge. When her best friend, conducting research at SeaGenesis stateside, is killed in a carjacking, Zee attends the funeral and meets Conor, who shares his suspicions that there is something shady about her employer. As more incidents raise more suspicions, Conor and Zee find themselves piecing together a puzzle involving the CIA, Mickey Sullivan, an incurable strain of malaria, Zee’s new drug, which just might cure it, and a conscience-stricken Vietnamese terrorist. The pace picks up with ugly revelations of Mickey Sullivan’s past, and the threat of thousands of deaths from malaria, as Zee and Conor yield to their mutual attraction and then develop mutual trust. Crises are averted and questions are answered in a conclusion that remains emotionally true to the characters. More complex and more assured than most firstnovels in the genre: a satisfying diversion from a promising newcomer. — From Kirkus Reviews

Mother to a Stranger. Leland Bardwell. 2002. 186p. The Blackstaff Press. Nan and Jim have a good, strong marriage. They both have their own careers—she is a successful concert pianist and he is an archaeologist. Together they have been living a congenial childless life of self-sufficiency in northwest Ireland. But the arrival of a solicitor’s letter one hot summer’s morning will undermine their idyll, perhaps fatally. A young man claiming to be Nan’s adopted-out son—a son Jim knows nothing about—is anxious to meet her.

Mother’s Love, A. Mary Morris. 1993. 287p. Doubleday. A bittersweet novel about a jewelry designer struggling with being abandoned by her own mother while trying to mother her newborn son. Moves seamlessly from the southwest in the past to present-day New York City. The Chicago Tribune says of the author, “A stylist of breathtaking originality.”

Mr Ives’ Christmas. Oscar Hijuelos. 1995. 256p. Harpercollins. Hijuelos’ novel tells the story of Mr. Ives, who was adopted from a foundling’s home as a child. When we first meet him in the 1950s, Mr. Ives is very much a product of his time. He has a successful career in advertising, a wife and two children, and believes he is on his way to pursuing the typical American dream. But the dream is shattered when his son Robert, who is studying for the priesthood, is killed violently at Christmas. Overwhelmed by grief and threatened by a loss of faith in humankind, Mr. Ives begins to question the very foundations of his life. Part love story—of a man for his wife, for his children, for God—and part meditation on how a person can find spiritual peace in the midst of crisis, Mr. Ives’ Christmas is a beautifully written, tender and passionate story of a man trying to put his life in perspective. In the expert hands of Oscar Hijuelos, the novel speaks eloquently to the most basic and fulfilling aspects of life for all of us. —This text refers to the Paperback edition. About the Author: Oscar Hijuelos was born of Cuban parentage in New York City in 1951. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. His five previous novels have been translated into 25 languages.

Mrs Einstein. Anna McGrail. 1998. 333p. Norton. In January 1902 Albert Einstein’s future wife Mileva Maric, a fellow student at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, gave birth to a baby girl in her hometown of Novi Sad in southern Hungary. The pregnancy was kept a secret from the couple’s closest friends, and little Lieserl was given up for adoption. Einstein and Mileva eventually married in 1903 and produced two sons. They divorced in 1918 and Einstein married his cousin Elsa. Nothing more is known about Einstein’s daughter, whose very existence remained a jealously guarded secret until 1986. In Mrs. Einstein, Anna McGrail imagines what might have become of Lieserl. The discarded daughter grows up with an astonishing mind and an abiding hatred for her father. Given her extraordinary mathematical ability—an ability she insists she has inherited from her mother—she resolves to haunt her father’s scientific career and sets herself to master cutting-edge physics, the science of gravity and light. She will match each of Einstein’s mathematical proofs with one of her own that goes beyond its conclusions or undermines its findings. Repeatedly thwarted by her material disadvantages and her restricted access to the current scientific journals, she eventually hits on an uglier plan. She will use Einstein’s own great equation, e = mc2 , to engineer a nuclear bomb. This ultimate weapon of mass destruction will be based on the scientific theories of the world-famous pacifist, and Einstein himself will be forced to recognize this fact by the daughter he resolutely refused to acknowledge. At this point McGrail returns us for a brief moment from fiction to history: Lieserl’s crucial discovery of the splitting of a uranium atom was indeed made by a woman scientist, Lise Meitner, in 1938. Lieserl’s obsession with her father takes her on a picaresque journey across Europe and on to America, accompanied by her larger-than-life friend and protector, the German teacher Maja. They survive a sequence of bizarre adventures that range from the absurdly comical to the tragic. McGrail’s fictional tale is sharply written, with enough mathematical detail woven in to make her Lieserl thoroughly convincing. Maja, an ingenious counterbalance for her single-minded heroine, is a bizarrely effective manipulator of the two women’s fortunes. Her ageless, chameleon beauty is magically modified to seduce any who stand in their way, improbably opening doors for them wherever they go. This is an entertaining, readable novel in which magic realism contrives a quirky kind of verisimilitude for a plot that is ultimately driven by the intricate twists and turns of 20th-century science. There is a gentle irony in McGrail’s championing of a forgotten daughter and her ill-treated mother that keeps the reader amused and attentive, and is never solemnly insistent. — Lisa Jardine

Music for the Third Ear. Susan Schwartz Senstad. 2001. 256p. Picador USA. There are two things that haunt Mette Kaldstad: her parents’ memories and stories of the Holocaust and her inability to bear children. Both come into play when she and her husband, Hans Olav, welcome two Balkan refugees, Mesud and Zheljka, into their home. Instead of being grateful, the refugees are withdrawn and even hostile, still shell-shocked from the war that devastated their lives individually and together. Despite their efforts, the Kaldstads are unable to connect with them. After the refugees have left their home, Mette seeks Zheljka out, searching for a common bond between them. In an unguarded moment, Zheljka tells Mette the story of her son, Zero, born after she was viciously gang-raped and then given up at Mesud’s insistence. The story captivates and horrifies Mette, whose desire for a child of her own borders on obsession. When Mette opens a letter addressed to Zheljka concerning the boy, the repercussions threaten both couples. A taut, engrossing novel that reveals how the effects of war trickle down from one generation to the next. — Kristine Huntley (Booklist). Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

My Brother Charles. Neil Bell (pseudonym of Stephen Southwold [1887-1964]). 1960. Alvin Redman (UK). About the Author: Stephen Southwold (1887-1964) was a prolific British writer. Born Stephen Henry Critten, he used a number of pseudonyms, eventually changing his name to one of them, Neil Bell.

My Kids. Robert J McHatton. 2006. 110p. Trafford Publishing Co (Canada). Mindy and Chip are two singer-songwriters who fall desperately in love. Chip always dreamt of living a happily-ever-after life, with kids and a happy wife and home. After Mindy and Chip marry, they struggle with infertility, finally adopting two children. Then the fighting begins, and Chip finds himself battling to keep his dream alive and for the right to keep his children. About the Author: Robert J. McHatton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer living in the Northwest.

My Mother’s Daughter. Judith Henry Wall. 2000. 432p. Simon & Schuster. Justine and Martha Claire Mayfield were born shortly after World War I and grew to womanhood as both sisters and inseparable friends, yet each harbored very different dreams for her future. Martha Claire envisions the American dream: a husband, a house, and—most of all—a baby. She marries Grayson Stewart, son of the town’s most successful businessman. He is everything Martha Claire could ever have hoped for in a man—handsome, affectionate, and considerate. However, more than a husband—more than anything in the world—Martha Claire wants a child. Everything in her life has been dedicated to preparing herself for motherhood. Without it, she feels she can never be complete. Justine has a very different plan for herself, and despite the similarity of the sisters’ upbringing, she and Martha Claire are very different people. Chafing at the narrow confines of her lazy Texas town, Justine joins the Women’s Army Corps when World War II begins. She envisions a glamorous, adventure-filled life on her own as a photographer. So it is with no little irony that when the war ends, Martha Claire is to be found back home, feathering a still-empty nest, while Justine returns from Europe suffering both the physical and mental distress of finding herself pregnant and unwed. It is from this starting point that Judith Henry Wall’s poignant and affecting novel follows these women as they set about living lives of compromise: for Martha Claire, the agony of being barren; for Justine, the frustration of loving her daughter, Iris, yet longing for the freedom to live life on her own terms. With much of the story seen through the eyes of Cissy, the daughter Martha Claire makes her own through adoption—and whose own story becomes an integral part of the novel—My Mother’s Daughter takes the reader on a journey into a world of seeming comfort and happiness that masks the darkness and frustrations and deadening discontent of unfulfilled dreams and—ultimately—to the worst kind of betrayal one sister can inflict upon another. Through the epic events and tumultuous changes of the second half of the twentieth century, and through the little tragedies that mark daily lives, the reader comes to know intimately and care deeply for these women and to understand the world they lived in and the forces that shaped them. My Mother’s Daughter is masterful, memorable storytelling of the highest order.

My Name is Light. Elsa Osorio. Translated by Catherine Jagoe. 2003. 388p. Bloomsbury USA. Luz, a twenty-year-old Argentinean, is on vacation in Madrid with her husband and newborn son. But Luz also has a secret mission—to find her real father. Carlos was a desaparecido, one of the many political activists who disappeared in Argentina during its dictatorship in the seventies; Luz’s mother, a political prisoner, was killed while trying to flee the country. Adopted as an infant by a wealthy, politically influential couple, Luz has grown up unaware of her true origins. Only three people know Luz’s real identity: her adopted father, Eduardo, racked by guilt at this deception; her adopted grandfather, the powerful and corrupt General Alfonso, determined to keep the secret buried; and Miriam, the prostitute who befriended Luz’s real mother in her final days and who returns from exile determined to tell Luz the truth. Faced with politics and corruption at every turn, Luz’s search for her father rapidly becomes a fight to save herself.

My Own Ground. High Nissenson. 1976. 182p. FS&G. Jake Brody, now 60, recollects his spiritual and sexual awakening as an orphaned 15- year-old Jewish immigrant on the lower East Side. Set in the year 1912, My Own Ground is the dramatic portrayal of the spiritual and sexual awakening of Jake Brody, an orphaned fifteen-year-old immigrant on New York’s Lower East Side. It is also the story of the love of Hannele Isaacs, the rabbi’s daughter, for the Jewish pimp Schlifka, who ruthlessly makes her one of his girls. In the struggle to save Hannele, Jacob comes of age abruptly, discovering violence, perversity, mysticism, sexuality, and death in the bitter reality of life at the turn of the 20th century.

My Search For Ruth. Anna Clarke. 1973. 149p. Richardson, Steirman & Black. Clarke’s narrator, Ruth, relives her haunted growing years and the torments she felt because no one would tell her the truth about her missing mother, also called Ruth. The orphan runs away from guardians and lies to a man she meets, telling him she’s a student at St. Margaret’s, where professor West escorts her. The headmistress, Miss Murry, who knew Ruth’s mother when she was a student there, allows the girl to stay and becomes her foster mother, asking Ruth to call her Nan. Bit by bit, Ruth inveigles information from Nan, which is revealed to be false in the mystery’s shocking finale. During succeeding events, hints about strange relationshipsbetween West and Miss Murry, between the girl and everyone else, are introduced as side issues that eventually prove meaningless, and irksome to boot. But a more serious failing lies in the character of the heroine; she is querulous, unkind, thankless and self-dramatizing. While the natural inclination is to sympathize with the orphan, readers may instead feel for Ruth’s generous benefactors. — Publisher’s Weekly.

My Son Africa. Froma Sand. 1965. 255p. Sherbourne Press. Single white woman, defying an entire country smoldering with racial tension, dares to adopt a Negro boy.

Myra, the Child of Adoption. Ann S Stephens. 1860. (A Reprint of the Classic Beadle Dime Novel). 144p. Globe Pequot Press. Popular literature during the middle nineteenth century illustrated cultural attitudes to the status of adopted children, showing the uncertainty attendant to children who did not have a blood tie to their families. (Some of the most famous nineteenth-century British Victorian novels centered around orphans, or children of unknown parentage, including Silas Marner by George Eliot, Great Expectations and Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope. See, Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, Marianne Novy, ed., (2001) [discussing currently relevant adoption issues addressed in some of these works].) For example, in the 1860 novel, Myra, the Child of Adoption, the unmarried and wealthy birth parents are unable to keep their child because of the shame that her birth might cause them. (The reasons prompting the married parents, Zulima and Daniel, to relinquish their child are appropriately complicated and sentimental. Zulima had previously married a man who was already married; until this man was convicted of bigamy, her marriage to Daniel retained an appearance of impropriety. Zulima is utterly distraught at giving up her baby, and finds ways to visit Myra in her new adoptive home without revealing her identity.) Shortly after Myra’s birth, her parents send her to live with some childless friends. The child calls her adoptive parents “Mother” and “Father,” and has no knowledge that she is not their biological child. Not until she seeks to marry someone of whom her father disapproves does she find out that she is not his blood relative, and thus not entitled to any of his property.

“Thank God!” he muttered, turning furiously upon the terrified girl—“Thank God, no drop of my blood runs in your veins.” .... A faint cry burst from Myra’s lips. She staggered back and fell upon a chair, her eyes distended.... .... Little by little, as her shattered nerves could bear it, the truth was revealed to Myra. It was a sad, sad trial, the uprooting of her pure domestic faith, the tearing asunder of those thousand delicate fibers that had so long woven, and clung, and rooted themselves around the parents who had adopted her.... Then came other thoughts and more thrilling anxieties. The beloved one, the man of her choice, whom she had dreamed of endowing with riches, from which she now seemed legally dispossessed—how would he receive the news of her orphanage—of her dependent state?

Myra writes her lover that she is “orphaned and without inheritance—her very birth loaded with doubt.” (Though her adoptive father eventually forgives her. she retains her status as a non-heir.) When her adoptive cousins come to visit after this revelation, they treat her coldly, viewing her as someone who had attempted to “defraud” them of their inheritance. (Though the novel is not necessarily an accurate representation of the legal reality, it does reflect popular conceptions of adoption.) On the other hand, in the 1886 Victorian novel, King Arthur: Not a Love Story, an American physician characterizes adoption in the United States quite differently. He explains that adoption makes the adoptee the legal heir of the adoptive parents, and the “real parents have no more right” to their child. Certainly in popular culture, the legal and social implications of adoption remained unsettled. [Excerpted from “Perfect Substitutes or the Real Thing?”, by Naomi Cahn (Duke Law Journal, Vol. 52, 2003)]. About the Author: Ann S. Stephens has the distinction of being the author of the first Beadle Dime Novel ever published, Maleska: Indian Wife of the White Hunter, issued by Beadle & Adams in the dime novel format in 1860, though it had previously been published in 1839. In addition to being one of Beadle’s most prolific wrtiers, she also penned stories for The Ladies’ Companion and The Ladies’ National Magazine. Although other publishers had attempted to sell cheap books before, Beadle and Adams revolutionized the field of cheap fiction by using cheap paper and bindings, standardizing their formats to make production less expensive, and cutting their prices to the mere ten cents per title from which the Dime Novel got its name in a time when most books sold for a dollar or more. The publisher frequently bought (or pirated) previously published work, but they also created a huge market for the work of women novelists of the time, some of whom remain well known to this day.

Mysterious Rider, The. Zane Grey. 1921. 336p. Grosset & Dunlap. Rancher Bill Belllounds brought up Columbine as though she were his daughter. Out of affection for her foster father, Columbine agrees to marry his son Jack, who is a drunkard, gambler, coward, and thief. But she really loves the cowboy, Wilson Moore. Then, the Mysterious Rider appears at the Belllounds ranch, a man of middle age, gentle, kindly, but so formidable a gun fighter he has earned the nickname Hell Bent Wade. He will play a pivotal role in righting the wrongs in the story.