From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Homes's searing 2004
New Yorker essay about meeting her biological parents 31 years after they gave her up for adoption forms the first half of this much-anticipated memoir, but the rest of the book doesn't match its visceral power. The first part, distilled by more than a decade's reflection and written with haunting precision, recounts Homes's unfulfilling reunions with both parents in 1993 after her birth mother, Ellen Ballman, contacted her. Homes (
This Book Will Change Your Life,) learns that Ballman became pregnant at age 22, after being seduced by Norman Hecht, the married owner of the shop where Ballman worked. But Ballman's emotional neediness and the more upwardly mobile Hecht's unwillingness to fully acknowledge Homes as a family member shakes Homes's deepest sense of self. The rest of the memoir is a more undigested account of how Ballman's death pushed Homes to research her genealogy. Hecht's refusal to help Homes apply to the Daughters of the American Revolution based on their shared lineage elicits her "nuclear-hot" rage, which devolves into a list of accusing questions she would ask him about his life choices in a mock
L.A. Law episode. The final chapter is a loving but tacked-on tribute to Homes's adoptive grandmother that may leave readers wishing the author had given herself more time to fully integrate her adoptive and biological selves.
(Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile
A.M. Homes always knew she was adopted. When she was 31, her biological mother initiated contact with her, the daughter she gave away. Jane Adams gives an extraordinary performance, bringing to life the almost clinical objectivity Homes employs throughout the first two-thirds of this memoir as she reassesses her identity after her biological mother turns her life upside down. The final third of the book spirals downward into rage over her father's broken promise to invite her into his family. Adams puts all that anger into her performance. After 22 minutes of asking questions without answers in a voice that becomes more and more hate-filled, Adams leaves the listener exhausted and full of pity for all the players in this sad story. N.E.M © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
