Sensitively pitched, moving, and refreshingly unsentimental.
Adoption activist Champnella describes how her four-year-old daughter persuaded her new family to help the little boy she left behind in China.
The author is frank about the stresses and dilemmas she and husband Rick faced after they adopted Lou Jiao in 1999 and renamed her Jaclyn. Though sympathetic to the efforts scantily funded Chinese orphanages are making to take care of the thousands of abandoned children like Lou Jiao, she is also disturbed by some of their practices. While most employees are loving caregivers, such amenities as toilets, beds, and clothing are grossly inadequate, corporal punishment is common, and bullying goes unpunished. These conditions haunted Jaclyn’s dreams during her first year in America and made her difficult to handle, especially around bedtime. Cindy and Rick already had six-year-old Kate, and three-year-old Chinese adoptee Christy, but from the moment she became their daughter, Jaclyn was obviously different. Energetic and high-spirited, with an excellent sense of humor, she also talked obsessively about her “baby,” worrying that he was being bullied and not taken care of. As she learned more English, Jaclyn campaigned to get that baby, Xiao Mei Mei, adopted. She prayed each night and constantly badgered her mother. In late 1999, Champnella took Jaclyn to China, met Xiao Mei Mei, and was immediately smitten. She and Rick decided to adopt the tiny boy, even though their finances were stretched thin and she could barely juggle her job as a school administrator with her family responsibilities. A happy solution to their dilemma was provided when the author’s sister Laura, another adoptive parent who had met Xiao Mei Mei on the same visit, declared that she wanted to adopt him. Champnella affectingly details how Jaclyn accepted this option for Xiao Mei Mei (newly christened Lee), finding joy in having him close and peace in no longer having to worry about his plight.
Sensitively pitched, moving, and refreshingly unsentimental.Pub Date: March 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30963-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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