Emily Prager

Four years after she adopted a daughter in China, author Emily Prager took her almost-five-year-old daughter for an extended stay in China to learn about her roots. Lulu and several other girls who had been adopted by Americans on the same day were from an orphanage in Wuhu. Prager and Lulu hoped to visit the orphanage where Lulu spent the first months of her life. The visit didn’t work out exactly as planned, partly because the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade shortly after show more their arrival in China drew attention to Prager as one of the few Westerners in the area. After that, Prager and her daughter didn’t venture far from their hotel and the preschool where Lulu was enrolled. Even under these limitations, Lulu, and by extension her adoptive mother, made friends everywhere she went, from hotel employees to local shopkeepers.

Prager and Lulu’s return visit to China came at a time when China was rapidly modernizing its infrastructure. In the 4 ½ years since Lulu’s adoption, the orphanage had moved into a new building, and the hotel where Prager had stayed and where she first met Lulu had been completely remodeled. Wuhu was a city in transition, with old buildings and communities being razed to make way for new, more modern construction. Families who have adopted children from China will be interested in this narrative of one family’s attempt to assimilate their child’s Chinese heritage into her sense of identity. Other readers may be more intrigued by this snapshot of China in transition. show less

Her name, she tells us, is Lucky Linderhoff, and she is thirteen years old -- and the events she tells us about, indeed the unspeakable events, that led to her present situation -- jail, as it turns out -- happened when she was only eleven.But speak about them she does, in her witty, sporadically wise, candid confessions of how she was seduced by her mother's husband, Roger Fishbite, during a hectic motor tour of motels. Lucky and Roger's odyssey -- jammed with jealous tantrums, show more recriminations, suspicions, and, yes, seduction -- is rambunctiously revealed in Lucky's lively little-girl voice, a voice that captures the combined personalities of Eloise and Lolita. show less

A modern retelling of Nabokov’s Lolita. But, unlike Lolita, I loved this book! It is told from the young female protagonist’s perspective. She has a very mature and impelling voice as she relates the events that led to her incarceration. The reader is left with no sympathy for her molester, and nothing but respect for her. None of the “blame the victim” crap that readers of Lolita come away with.

The title sums it up. This is a DIARY of an extended vacation in China. The US author adopts a Chinese girl - one of the first Chinese adoptions. Now that Lulu is 4, the author takes her back to her birth area, which she believes is Wuhu (Lulu was abandoned near a police station in Wuhu and taken to the orphanage there). Daily account of what they saw and did. Interesting point for the author - for the first time, SHE is the minority and her daughter fits in. And she calls out that turn of show more events in her story. show less