A detailed look at a complex, sometimes-harrowing adoption experience.
A woman chronicles her and her husband’s journey to adopt a child in China.
Reicher (Reaching God’s Perfection, 2014), a former U.S. Marine and massage therapist, writes that she always wanted to have a family, but after a series of physical ailments (including removal of a gland following an infection), she and her husband, Norm, realized that they couldn’t naturally conceive. Reicher felt that she was “born with such an urge to rescue and be responsible,” and she and her husband decided to adopt a Chinese child. The pair traveled to Changsha, the province where their baby was born and where they would have to live for five days before the adoption could be finalized. Reicher describes her time in China in detail, including meeting her translator, Samuel, who guided her through the adoption process and whose “kindness, willingness, understanding and patience was unfathomable.” The couple finally met their new baby, whom they named Sarah QiQi. Sarah turned out to be very ill when Reicher and her husband first encounter her, so they oversaw her medical care at the orphanage. As Reicher told her family, “I could not turn down a baby. That would be ridiculous,” and she held true to that sentiment, diligently nursing her baby back to health. Overall, this is not a story that delves into the personalities of the people involved; indeed, readers don’t learn very much about either Reicher or her spouse. Rather, it’s centered on the nuts and bolts of a specific adoption, and, as such, it’s an illuminating look at an adoption process abroad. As a result, the narration consists mostly of summary, with some occasional dialogue sprinkled in, which gives the story a fast pace. At the same time, though, it often results in a lack of atmospheric and emotional description.
A detailed look at a complex, sometimes-harrowing adoption experience.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5425-9908-5
Page Count: 194
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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