Stop a moment and feed your brain. Don't forget to leave a note before you go

Secret Daughter

posted by

One of the loveliest expressions of the multi-faceted nature of adoption, Secret Daughter, blew me away with its authenticity and its incredible, strong, three-dimensional female characters. Secret Daughter is an emotionally resonating fictional story of three women who will stay with you long after you finish the book. Kavita, the Indian birth mother, tragically suffers through the birth of two daughters she is never allowed to keep in a poor country that values only boy children for what they can contribute to the family and economy. Somer is a married American doctor who will seek to adopt her child from her husband’s home of India, a girl child from an orphanage where her mother-in-law is well known as a volunteer and patron. Asha is that child. Indian born, raised in America, living a life of privilege, and yet she is never really able to discuss or truly access information or feelings about her adoption until she is nearly an adult. The story begins with Kavita giving birth in Dahanu, India 1984. She has a daughter and recalls in flashback the first daughter she gave birth to: “Kavita spent the next two days curled up on the woven straw mat on the floor of the hut. She did not dare ask what had happened to her baby. Whether she was drowned, suffocated or simply left to starve, Kavita hoped only that death came quickly, mercifully. …Like so many baby girls her first born would be returned to the earth long before her time.” When she realizes she has given birth to a second daughter about to face the same fate, she summons an amazing resource of courage and strength and walks miles with her sister to an orphanage where baby girls are left. She risks being beaten by her drunken husband, or worse by strangers to deliver this girl child to safety. Somer is an American doctor married to Krishnan, an Indian student who emigrated to the U.S to study at medical school and remained as a citizen in California. Krishnan maintains strong ties to family in India. Secret Daughter is told in the third person omniscent narrative style, but it is the alternating tale of the two women, adoptive mother and birth mother that makes this novel one of the best I have read in years. A brilliant juxtaposition of birth mother suffering a loss, quickly moves to another mother seeking to become one, Somer, suffering a devastating miscarriage – again. As Somer lies in hospital she thinks of her losses: “They don’t understand it’s not just the baby she lost. It’s everything. The names she runs through as she lies in bed at night. The paint samples for the nursery she’s collected in her desk drawer.” It seems logical when Somer and Krishnan turn to his home of India with the idea of adopting internationally. Somer, a strong independent American woman, is infuriated and quickly made to feel the outsider when she, a Caucasian female stands with her husband united in their desire and intent to create a family. It is at the orphanage and through the various hoops that a male bureaucracy sets up for foreign adoption that Somer feels the first pangs of something akin to culture shock. It is she, an adoptive mother whose skin differs from her child, who will oddly be made to feel time and again throughout her life as if she does not fit, or is less than a biological parent. Many times over the coming years Somer will be mistaken for the nanny. Her physical and personality differences make her an outsider. Similarly Asha feels herself an oddity, an only child raised in a family of doctors, for whom it is an assumed career path. Never really knowing details of her biological parent’s story, Asha imagines all kinds of stories and makes them her own, until it is no longer enough to fantasize her adoption story. Secret Daughter is such a real and raw story of adoption, it will make you laugh and cry and you won’t be able to put it down and it will also help you, no matter where you are or who you are understand adoption better. As an adoptive parent I was truly amazed every time one of the characters spoke such a true feeling or phrase that I have heard repeatedly, either in my own home, or from the many wonderful friends of ours who also have formed their families through adoption. There comes a point in this story where the mother and daughter discussions are so heated that it literally gives the reader great pause and takes your breath away. Asha, in her teens blurts how Somer and Krishnan are not “her real parents. Everyone else knows where they come from, but I have no idea. I don’t know why I have these eyes that everybody always notices. I don’t know how to deal with this damn hair of mine.” Asha, raised without details of her adoption and made to feel that it was not a topic she might discuss in her home for fear of hurt feelings, eventually explodes. Things are said by everyone, adoptive mother included that sever relationships and do almost irreparable damage. Also not knowing the truth of the relinquishment story and the sacrifices made by Kavita, Somer herself makes horrible assumptions and in the process hurts her daughter and her marriage. “Her mother’s voice drops to a hoarse whisper. ‘At least I wanted you.'” Secret Daughter is simply one of the best books I’ve read in years. I did not receive this one from a publisher for review, I bought it myself and had to share it with my readers because it is so magnificent and there are so many lessons to be learned here throughout this adoption story. Shilpi Somaya Gowda was raised in Toronto and has lived many places. Her parents emigrated from Mumbai. She has an MBA and now lives in California with her children and husband. Perhaps most telling of why this story is so authentic, is the fact that she spent a summer volunteering at an Indian orphnage. I look forward to more from this author. This book would make a fantastic Christmas gift for the readers on your list. To purchase Secret Daughter click on my Amazon.ca carousel widget at side of page. Affiliate links and ads help fund this blog.

Thriftymommastips $$$$$ out of $$$$$. (5 out of 5: my highest rating)
Secret Daughter, first edition paperback, William Morrow, a division of Harper Collins, 2010, $17.99 U.S. 340 pages plus helpful glossary at end of Indian words

Even The Dogs

posted by

If this book were a person it would be your rambling Uncle Reggie with all the skeletons in his closet, you know the relative with a genius level IQ and possibly undiagnosed schizophrenia, the guy that drank it all away and then showed up at Christmas to start a fight. Nobody really likes to be around Uncle Reggie, because he reminds them how fragile the balance of mental health and life, but in reality at the end of the day when you are quiet with just your thoughts, even you have got to admit that Uncle Reggie is far more interesting than all the rest of your relatives combined. At the start of Even The Dogs, is the death of a homeless man, Robert, a person found on a day between Christmas and New Year’s inside an abandoned apartment building. The fictional story that arises out of this sad event is more real than most. What follows is a makeshift eulogy, a strange remembrance of the pitiful man who died, as told by his friends and acquaintances. The key here is the friends and acquaintances. They are each homeless addicts living on the fringes of society, drugged and searching for drugs, drying out and then checking into rehab and then relapsing again. Their remembrances are heartfelt to be sure, but also dreamy, nebulous, frantic, rushed, interrupted, disjointed, confused, urgent, pressured and half forgotten. “Had to find someone and tell them was all he could think. Had to find Laura and let her know, had to find Mike.” We are told Robert had a daughter named Laura and her father’s friends speculate where she might have gone, until the end of the novel when she is forced to reveal, at an inquest, that she abandoned her father to score drugs.

Even The Dogs is an odd novel at first to get into and slightly off-putting with strange use of punctuation and rambling sentences and the continuous use of the pronoun “we.” And yet, if you stick with it and invest yourself fully, by the end of the book all of these stylistic devices truly make sense. In fact, not unlike a drug, when you let this novel fully wash over you, the brilliance of it hits and you are left in awe. Jon McGregor’s latest tale appeared with much advance praise and buzz about the Booker prize and yet it is a difficult read. It is one of the more deceptive reads I’ve been given lately for review here at brainfood. The style is very evocative of the Virginia Woolf school of stream-of-consciousness and this reminded me a great deal of some of the duty reads from university English literature classes of years gone by.  At first it left me cold and then I realized that was partly the point. You are supposed to feel hot and cold about the topic matter at hand and the death of a homeless drunk is really not poetry to most. He will be given a pauper’s funeral and his friends wonder at the sadness and hopelessness at the end of this lifeMcGregor is a stylist of the highest calibre and  a writer’s writer for sure. Here we will find sentences paused mid-thought, punctuation dropped or forgotten, mishmashed grammar and rambling odd rants about life on the street. McGregor’s characters have strong voices and his talent for dialect is nothing, if not realistic. McGregor has also written If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and So Many Ways To Begin. He has won the Somerset Maugham Award and The Betty Trask Prize. He was born in Bermuda and now lives in England.

thriftymommastips rating $$$$ out of $$$$$
Not for everyone, but realistic, highly intelligent and brave writing.
Bloomsbury USA New York, 2010, $17.50 Canada. $14 US.

Still Alice

posted by

Still Alice by Lisa Genova is a lovely, bittersweet, insightful l look, at the devastating diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Alice Howland, an accomplished Harvard professor, is barely 50 when she starts to realize her brain is beginnning to fail her. Forgetfulness is becoming an issue. She often is at a loss for words and occasionally becomes lost at work on the campus near the university where she teaches. She loses her place in a telephone conversation with her grown children often and simply isn’t as sharp as she once was. These small blips require further investigation and so she reluctantly and, with disbelief, consults her doctor. The diagnosis, while shocking, isn’t completely a surprise as Alice seems to know in her gut that something is wrong long before it is given a name. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. She keeps the diagnosis to herself for far too long, until she is no longer able. When she shares the devastating news with family, they react in their own ways, each one revealing different facets of the disease. To Alice’s oldest daughter it is particularly frightening as she becomes pregnant and worries the genes might be passed to her twins. Projecting into the future she also worries she may someday be a burden to her own children if she develops symptoms. Youngest child Lydia, the artistic actress, surprisingly rises to the challenge as caregiver of her mother. Their bond is strengthened by the mother’s vulnerability. Lydia chooses not to have the testing that would reveal her future health. Her brother Tom carries survivor guilt of sorts when it is revealed that he should not get Alzheimer’s. Her husband, John, a brilliant doctor, hides his feelings and refuses to believe his wife may someday be unable to remember his name. He is a secondary character at best in this story and he is sometimes unlikeable as the heartbroken husband struggling to decide if he can manage his feelings while unable, at times, to see the essence of Alice beneath the deterioration. John chooses work as a refuge from his homebound formerly vibrant wife. “If I am in lab, I don’t have to watch you sticking Post-it notes on all the cabinets and doors. I can’t just stay home and watch you get worse. It kills me.” can’t take it Alice. The impact on Alice’s family is dealt with nicely here in this novel, as each of Alice’s children struggle to decide if they will be tested for genetic markers that will tell them whether they may develop the same terrible disease. But it is Alice’s story that clearly dominates the novel and her character we feel for all throughout her sad journey. While this is a fictional story, Genova, who has a PHD in neuroscience from Harvard University, is an expert on the details of this disease, and I loved that I learned so much about the inner workings of the brain from this book. This book has all of the elements of a good story and has won a few accolades along the way including the 2008 Bronte prize and yet I felt the writing lacked sophistication and style. This is a great story and it is nicely written and I would recommend it to almost anyone, but the writing is simply good, not great.  

Still Alice, by Lisa Genova is published by Simon and Schuster, New York 2007
The Mass Market edition was $10.99 in Canada.
thriftymommastips rating $$$$ out of $$$$$.

Thriftymommastips did not receive any compensation for this review