"A birthday as a clerical error"

"The speculative is not conjecture for adoptees, but it is our 'real life'" ( )

The author, an adoptee, explores how her life might have been different if she had been raised by her birth mother, whom she met as an adult. She also discovered as an adult that her birth father had died when she was six. To include him in the story, there are some speculative fiction aspects such as wormholes. The book bounces back and forth in time and perspective, and switches from first person to third person frequently, sometimes mid-paragraph. While I believe this to be intentional, it was one of the things that threw me out of the narrative. All in all, I found that this writing style just didn't appeal to me. I was intrigued by the premise, enough so that I finished the book, but it left me feeling unsatisfied. ( )

An ambitiously authentic adoption story where fiction does the work of truth, and archives, correspondence, and health records provide the roots of fantasy.

When she was 19, Shannon Elaine Gibney met Erin Rebecca Powers via a letter from Child and Family Services of Michigan. Yet their existences had already been deeply and intimately interwoven. Shannon was adopted by middle-class White parents Jim and Susan Gibney soon after her birth in 1975, but her alcoholic White birth mother, Patricia Powers, had named her Erin. Narratively, time and space become impressively distorted as Gibney relays autobiographical accounts of Shannon and Erin that complicate her conceptions of self as a transracial adoptee, biracial Black woman, writer, and science-fiction fan. Erin is imagined at dinner tables with extended family whom Shannon would never know well, if it all, facing the racist familial microaggressions she can’t quite avoid in any timeline. Biographical elements are similarly reconfigured: A maternal genetic predisposition to cancer and discovering parts of her Black biological father and his family tree that had all but been erased help flesh out Shannon and Erin in fuller, more embodied ways. Gibney invokes poet Audre Lorde as a sort of third mother, a source of creative inspiration and guidance. As both Erin and Shannon proceed through the spiral wormhole that threads this text together, Gibney offers up the singularly essential connective tissue of a robust and personal body of work.

An innovative and captivating reflection on identity and self. (author’s note, further reading) (Speculative nonfiction. 14-adult)

-Kirkus Review