Throwaway Daughter

I did not finish the book. I felt the author's writing about the characters in China was excellent or at least plausible, but her voice did not exactly feel authentic when she was trying to write first-person point of view in the persona of the Canadian characters. The reason for Grace / Dong-Mei's antipathy towards China never really came through and Jane (adoptive mother) didn't really gel as a person. I guess that is a risk an author takes when trying to write a story in which half a dozen different people appear and use first-person narration throughout. It's hard enough to get into one person's skin. For the reader, similarly, it's difficult to identify with, or even empathize with, all these characters. Before I gave up, I skimmed show more and skipped through the remainder of the book and still didn't find it caught my interest.

In addition, I'm afraid that reading a little about the author and knowing that she abandoned her own child in China to come to Canada and pursue her own goals in life, made me feel that she wasn't entirely sincere about the story she was telling. The tale of the One Child Policy in China is important and Ye Ting-Xing would probably be a good person to tell it, but this isn't that book. show less

Upon first reading this book, I loved it. It was like looking through a window into another world. Hearing the two different perspectives (the daughter's and the mother's) gives insight into the human side of this issue.

Orphan