Claudia And The Great Search (1990) - Plot & Excerpts
god, i love the claudia books! her narrative voice is so hilarious. this one opens with claudia counting down the minutes in science class until she can leave to head over to the high school for an awards ceremony. her older sister, janine the genius, is being given a very prestigious science award. mr. & mrs. kishi are beside themselves with pride. claudia is not looking forward to it at all, because she feels like she's a dummy & that her parents would like her better if she was a genius too, but she can't help it--she's just a weirdo who can't spell.that night at dinner, claudia's parents are fawning all over janine, asking what she's going to do with the check she got, beaming when she says she's going to put it away for college (as if she won't get a full scholarship somewhere). after dinner, claudia pages through some family photo albums & realizes that while there are a gazillion photos of janine, there are barely any photos of her. there's not even a photo of her being brought home from the hospital. she looks through her parents' desk, hoping to find photos they just haven't had time to put in albums, but she finds a locked strongbox instead. & because this is claudia we're talking about, & she's read too many nancy drew books, she realizes that she must be adopted & her adoption papers are locked in the box. she looks for the key to the box, but can't find it.she keeps the news to herself for a week, but she's really down about the fact that she was adopted & her parents have been forcing her to live a lie all these years. the big babysitting sup-plot du jour this time involves emily michelle, kristy's adopted vietnamese sister. emily is having a lot of learning problems. she still likes baby toys, she doesn't know shapes or colors, her vocabulary is really limited, she's not toilet-trained. some of this is because she is new to the english language, but even her doctor is a little concerned. & kristy is stressing because she wants to spend more time with emily & help her out, but she's busy with a regular sitting job with the papadakis kids across the street.claudia thinks about how lucky emily is that her adoptive parents are being honest with her. she compares herself to emily: neither of them look like the other members of their families, both of them have trouble learning. so claudia decides to seek out the truth about her identity. she starts by calling the agency that the brewers used to adopt emily. they tell her they have only been in business for five years (& that they only place vietnamese children, which i covered in my kristy & the mother's day surprise recap--diplomatic relations & hence, american adoptions of vietnamese children--were not normalized until 1996 & this book is from 1989, i believe). so claudia stops by her former pediatrician's office & pretends she has a school assignment that requires her to learn about her birth. the receptionist informs claudia that she didn't start seeing that doctor until she was two years old. i think it's mighty convenient that the receptionist remembers that kind of detail about some random former patient. it's kind of like the chris farley/mr. biggg scene in "wayne's world." "he had an awful lot of information for a security guard, don't you think?" but let's go with it. claudia certainly does. she interprets it as proof positive that she was adopted.next, claudia goes to the public library while her mother (the head librarian) is in a staff meeting & looks at the birth announcements for the week she was born on microfiche. there is no announcement for her. so she writes down the info on the other girl babies born the same week as her & decides to find them & try to get information about the babies named to see if maybe they are her & her parents just changed her name after she was adopted.which is fairly ridiculous. if she was born in stoneybrook & adopted at birth, wouldn't her now-parents be listed in the birth announcements instead of her birth parents? & if she was adopted through an agency, she could have been born anywhere. but claudia is convinced that she was born in stoneybrook because her parents wouldn't have wanted to travel with an infant. what? this makes no sense.conveniently, one of the announcements is for a baby named resa ho. she was born to parents visitinf from wyoming. because who doesn't love to travel when they're on the verge of giving birth? after ruling out the local parents (who are shockingly forthcoming about the names & ages of their children to some stranger asking questions over the phone--claudia could be a serial killer for all these people know!), claudia calls the three hos listed for the town in wyoming named in the newspaper. like the family couldn't have moved to a different town in the last 13 years. she rules two out when they don't have any 13-year-old daughters...even though the whole point of claudia being adopted is that her birth parents wouldn't currently have any 13-year-old daughters. logic fail. it's not like they'd be all, "yes, i have three sons, & also there is a girl i gave up at birth. she would be 13 now." what?anyway, claudia doesn't get an answer at the last number, so she assumes that must be her birth mother. she calls stacey to share the news. stacey is skeptical & encourages claudia to talk to her parents.so she does. & they are quick to assure her that they are her birth parents after all. there are few photos because they were too busy to take photos with two little kids, & plus, the thrill wears off when you have your second baby. (but still. not even a photo of her coming home from the hospital?) her birth announcement was published in a paper that has since gone out of business, but mrs. kishi still has a copy, which she shows claudia. the strongbox is full of emergency cash. & while claudia may not look much like her parents, she's the spitting image of her grandmother mimi when mimi was 13. mrs. kishi has the old photos to prove it. so claudia feels much better.she is also hired to tutor emily michelle on shapes, colors, counting, etc, & she does such a bang up job that emily is accepted into a pre-school that had previously rejected her for being too far behind the other kids. so claudia may not be great at doing her own homework, but she knows her colors well enough to teach a two-year-old. my favorite part of the book is when claudia is gazing at a photo of mimi from when she was 13 & stacey shows up for a BSC meeting. claudia was so engrossed in the photo that she didn't hear stacey come in. stacey asks if it's mimi & claudia says yes, & narrates for us that she tried not to show that stacey took ten years off her life sneaking up on her like that. i LOLed. i just love the mental image of claudia trying to maintain her poise when she always comes across as such a crazy flake. oh, claudia. never change.
Claudia starts suspecting that she was adopted because the germ of the idea was planted in her head through her relationship with adopted child Emily Michelle, in Kristy's family. After all, Claudia's the black sheep of her family: weird fashion, looks different, isn't smart like Janine, no one gets her . . . and . . . SHE CAN'T FIND BABY PICTURES OF HERSELF OMG. She then starts Nancy Drewing it up and conveniently all kinds of clues point to her having been adopted. But they're all also pretty silly. The thing that I liked best about this book, though, was her finding out that she looked a lot like her grandmother had at the same age, because she was very close to her grandmother and I'm sure that would have eased her alienation a bit. I was a first child myself and there are twelve billion baby pictures of me and pretty much none of my sister when she was new . . . we've even talked about how weird that is. So I didn't think there being no baby photos of Claudia was particularly weird since that's how it is in my own family.
What do You think about Claudia And The Great Search (1990)?
I never quite understood this book. Claudia, who is Japanese-American, is somehow convinced that she was adopted by her Japanese-American family after spending some time with Kristy's adopted sister Emily (a 2-year-old from Korea). She is convinced of this because her sister Janine is smart, while Claudia couldn't spell to save her life, and because she likes to read Nancy Drew, which her mother the librarian thinks is "trash." Plus there are hardly any pictures of Claudia as a baby! In the end we find out that no, Claudia is not adopted. Big surprise.
—Kate
