Although of some interest to would-be adoptive parents looking outside the US for a child, this falls mostly flat.
An undistinguished account of an American couple’s travails in adopting a Russian baby.
First-time author Newman pads the bits and pieces of her adoption saga that have appeared in magazines and Internet publications (among them Salon) to make a sometimes genial, sometimes arch narrative. She writes affectingly of her failure to conceive naturally and of her decision to seek a child for adoption in Russia, a country her adoption agency’s brochure warned was "bleak and degenerating. Delays are to be expected. . . . It is not uncommon for adoptions to be stalled or never completed.” Newman and her husband found those words to be resoundingly true as they filled out mountains of forms, paid bribes and tips, and blundered from one bureaucrat’s desk to another. Eventually they found a candidate, an undernourished infant boy who had been abandoned in a Moscow hospital three days after his birth to a Ukrainian mother and immediately placed in an orphanage. “Because it was still winter,” Newman writes, “they chose for his last name the Russian word for snow.” Led through the process of bringing young Grisha (renamed Alex) out of the orphanage by a guide whose hand constantly reached for the American couple’s hard currency, the Newmans came close to losing their patience and giving up on the whole project; in the end, Newman’s story nearly collapses under the weight of the couple’s frustration at the unfamiliar intricacies of an alien adoption system—and Newman seems to consider it an injustice that the Russian government prefers to place the orphaned or abandoned infants under its charge in the care of Russian families rather than of foreigners, no matter how well-intended.
Although of some interest to would-be adoptive parents looking outside the US for a child, this falls mostly flat.Pub Date: March 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-25214-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Good-humored bottom-line account of the changes wrought when a successful and independent woman becomes a mother.
With the recent spate of books by primiparas on the joys and conflicts of motherhood, a new one needs a gimmick and this one has it: a brittle, comic, and sporadically insightful month-by-month record of how much baby is costing.
Novelist Howie (Snow, 1998), nearing 40 and with the father of her baby already 57, begins by asking some pertinent questions about her physical, psychological, emotional, and financial ability to bear and raise a child. The financial question is the only one she can get a grip on, and she sets up Callie's tally early in her pregnancy, including the pregnancy test ($25), amniocentesis ($81), and “fat clothes” ($411.11). Callie's debt includes a top-of-the-line McLaren stroller ($230) and a $90 car seat. It also encompasses vitamin pills for mother and baby and legal fees for setting up a will to protect Callie in case of her parents' deaths. It does not include banking the stem-cord cells that may benefit others in her family. Added in are church offerings at $5/week (the author is not religious, but she feels it's important for the baby). Callie is also charged meeting fees for her mother's Weight Watchers regimen (a part-time actress, Howie rationalizes that her post-pregnancy weight gain and subsequent lack of jobs is Callie's responsibility). More than just a spreadsheet, the financial log is also used to raise issues confronting first-time mothers today, ranging from impulse shopping to teething to returning to work and pumping breast milk. She also hits some emotional hot spots with confessions of anger, envy, and “this buried-deep, ripping . . . fear” of losing Callie. Charges to Callie for her first year: $9,099.85.
Good-humored bottom-line account of the changes wrought when a successful and independent woman becomes a mother.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58542-175-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A shallow celebration of fathers and daughters. Berry (co-author of the bestselling Girlfriends: Invisible Bonds, Enduring Ties) and Barrington, a record producer, interviewed themselves and dozens of daughters and fathers to collect the stories of attachment that appear in this book. The anecdotes seem to have been published almost exactly as they tumbled out of the tape recorder. Occasional contributions have the self-consciously florid voice of a novice in a creative writing class. The book is organized in roughly chronological order, from birth (of the daughters) to death (of the fathers). The first section, winningly titled “It’s a Girl,” asks fathers to recount their experiences with pregnancy, birth, and bonding with their new babies. One father lovingly carried the baby’s sonogram picture with him for months before she was born; another’s attachment to his daughter deepened, more earthily, when she had her first bowel movement. The second section is devoted to the maturation process of girls growing up and in the course of it learning from their fathers. Section three concerns fathers and adult daughters; the last section deals with fathers’ regrets, reconciliations, illnesses, and deaths. Each chapter is preceded by quotations from famous daughters, including Colette, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Marie Osmond. There are chapters on dads and pets, dads and cars, dads and dates, and a singularly unamusing one titled “He could always make me laugh.” (Clearly, you had to be there.) Not all of the fathers featured here wear halos—abusive and absent fathers are also included on the roster—but for the most part, the stories reach happy endings. A concluding section lets some of the daughters, including the authors, sum up each father’s impact on their lives. Typically, the women praise their fathers for encouraging them to fulfill their dreams. Mostly trite—and unworthy of the fathers supposedly honored. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84992-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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